Marion (Gina McKee) and Tom (Linus Roach) are retirees who have decided to spend the rest of their lives in a coastal town in the south of England, and after learning that their former friend Patrick (Rupert Everett) suffered a severe stroke, Marion decided to take care for him. Although Tom is clearly dissatisfied with his wife’s decision and does not even want to look at Patrick, he will settle in their house anyway, and then we go back in time and follow their story half a century ago in parallel. Marion (Emma Corrin) is a young teacher who met a young police officer (Harry Styles) and soon they will become engaged, but the slightly older museum curator Patrick (David Dawson) will soon enter their lives and an unexpected love will develop between these three people. triangle.
The action takes place there in the fifties, when homosexuality was not only prohibited and punishable in Great Britain, but those sexually deviant people, as they were called then, ended up in prison because of their inclinations. Thus, Marion will serve as a kind of cover for Tom’s romance with Patrick, and although this young policeman will try to suppress his feelings, he will not quite succeed and their relationship will soon be exposed. “My Policeman” is a film about repressed feelings, guilt and shame that will haunt Tom all the time, performed by Styles, who is somewhat expected and the weakest link in the whole film. The young English actress Emma Corrin was even the best of the entire cast, while the direction is somewhat theatrical, which is not surprising if you know that Michael Grandage is primarily a theater director.
All the same, “My Policeman” was more than a solid melodrama, a tragic and sad story about wasted lives spent in lies and hiding. The story is finely structured and balances well between the events of the fifties and those of the present, and we slowly understand how what happened between the three of them in their youth had an impact on their lives later. So even though homosexuality was punishable at the time, apparently gays managed to “sniff” each other without problems, so even the elegant muzealian didn’t mind too much that Tom had just started a relationship with Marion. Poor simple-minded and shy Tom didn’t even know he was gay yet and indulged his passions with another man, but we knew from the beginning that this relationship was doomed.