Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we’re revisiting the British boarding school drama Another Country, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.
Being part of the gay community has historically always meant being an outcast. Whether shunned or rejected socially by our peers, or through more official discriminatory laws, being labeled as an “other” just comes with the territory.
We have found ways to work with this—mostly by creating a meaningful and lively community of our own—but also by aligning ourselves with other groups that have historically also been marginalized: women, people of color, immigrants, and any other people that go against the grain of whatever the “establishment” is.
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This week, we’re taking a look at the 1984 British romantic drama Another Country, in which two young men are marginalized in their own way by their conservative and traditional boarding school: one is a fairly open gay man, and the other a very open socialist. When the headmasters start seeing the status quo being threatened and upended by their presence, they begin taking strong measures to contain them, and the two boys find solace and strength in each other.
The Set-Up
Another Country was directed by Marek Kanievska, and written by Julian Mitchell, based on his own play of the same name. It is loosely based on the real-life history of Guy Burgess, a British man that became a Soviet double agent spy during the Cold War. However, the film focuses almost entirely on his formative years in boarding school, when he was first exposed to radical political views by one of his peers, and how his own homosexuality and ostracization from the system may have contributed to his political future.
The film is set in the 1930s and stars Rupert Everett (one of the most quintessential performers of swoony, British queer characters) as Guy Bennett, the stand-in for Burgess, and Colin Firth (in his very first film performance!) as his roommate Tommy Judd.
They both attend a boarding school that prides itself in tradition and in sculpting the next class of British upper class (modeled after British academic establishments like Eton and Winchester), although both young men are very explicitly outside of said system.
The Outsiders
Image Credit: ‘Another Country,’ Orion Classics
Judd is a self-declared, proud Marxist, and believes that the mission and values that the school is upholding are oppressing the masses and fueling an inevitable revolution.
Bennett is gay, which is more or less an accepted fact by everyone around him, including his mother (who seems to have married an army man for the sole purpose of putting him back into shape), his classmates, and the prefects at school. He doesn’t really hide his sexuality from anyone, and is remarkably comfortable in his own skin and acting on his feelings. But it also puts an automatic target on his back.
When two of their classmates are caught masturbating in the showers together, and one of them commits suicide afterwards, the school board begins an active plan to suppress any other potential wrongdoers, and prevent the outside world from getting incorrect ideas about the kind of people they are harboring. Classmates and professors alike are then instructed to keep a closer eye on Bennett’s activities, as he starts to feel his life and freedom slipping away from him.
Boarded Up
Image Credit: ‘Another Country,’ Orion Classics
The plot isn’t necessarily the strongest point of this movie. It’s framed as an anecdote that the older Bennett tells a journalist after being exposed as a spy, but that aspect never comes into play for the rest of the movie.
Another Country is completely contained in the events at the school, and only hints at how all that happened there could have informed his actions later. As a spy story (which is how a lot of the summaries and synopsis describe the movie), it is shockingly lacking, especially since there actually seems to be a compelling narrative that takes place after the film’s events end.
However, what the movie does excel at is painting a portrait of two repressed young men trapped inside an institution that wants them gone.
Complimentary Co-Stars
Rupert Everett does a remarkable job at expressing the longing and yearning of someone that just wants a chance in life, and that is willing to risk the privileged status that life has given him for it. He invites a boy (a young, very pretty Cary Elwes) to his mother’s wedding that he eventually ends up falling in love with. There is open tenderness and affection between the two of them, and it’s refreshing to see a character in a gay period piece that is so self-assured about his own identity.
As for Colin Firth, it’s great to see him so confident and able to give such a layered performance from his very first go, but the character seems trapped in the lost narrative of the story that focuses much more on Bennett’s spy efforts, which are never seen or tackled. He is the seed that is planted on Bennett that would pay off years later, but at least in the timeline where the story takes place, he’s no more than a sounding board, giving occasional words of advice and reflecting on Bennett’s outcast status.
An A+ In Chemistry
Image Credit: ‘Another Country,’ Orion Classics
Everett and Firth have tremendous chemistry together, and one wishes the film would focus a bit more on the friendship and emotional bonds they created together as rejects from the institution they were forced onto. Even though there is no romance between the two of them, they accept each other from who they are and what they believe in, and that is sometimes much more valuable than a romantic or sexual spark.
There seems to be a bigger, much more sprawling and engaging narrative hidden underneath the lavish boarding school hallways and pristine uniforms that adorn the film. But Another Country is worth a watch as another entry in the canon of swoony period British queer dramas, as well as a relatively nuanced depiction of two individuals that bond together over being left aside, and how that sometimes that is enough to keep you going.
Another Country is currently streaming via BritBox, Fandor, Peacock, Shout TV, The Roku Channel, and Tubi.
