Queerguru’s Robert Malcolm reviews LILIES NOT FOR ME : the period queer love story debut of filmmaker Will Seefried

American writer-director Will Seefried’s first feature film, Lilies Not For Me, premiered this August at the Edinburgh Film Festival to mixed reviews.

But with a strong cast of promising newcomers, including the brooding Fionn O’Shea in the lead, it is a confident, original debut, and suggests that Seefried is a name to watch.

The gay love story in his novel is tastefully presented in the manner of an idyllic Merchant Ivory drama which contrasts starkly with the trauma and torture of the authoritarian hospital.

The dappled English countryside never looked more ravishing while the young men cast longing glances at each other as they work or shower. Close ups of bodies intertwined at sunrise are accompanied by birdsong and after dark, the camera scans the interior of their cottage hideaway, bathed in firelight.

In his novel things are taken to their extreme and lead to a ‘folie à deux’ from the lovers. The arrogance and entitlement of Owens’s lover Phillip, a doctor, becomes evident as his irrational obsession bends Owen’s moral compass. Phillip is ending their relationship for the sake of propriety and believes he will now live a normal life, but Owen cannot and will not change.

But before Phillip leaves to return to a heterosexual life, a handsome young working class man Charlie, turns up on their doorstep searching for his father. The couple let Charlie stay in a nearby bothy and Owen strikes up a friendship with him. Owen’s reading to Charlie, from the 19th century poem by Digby Mackworth Dolben which gives the film its title, leads to the director’s most original and memorable scene. are accompanied by birdsong and after dark, the camera scans the interior of their cottage hideaway, bathed in firelight.  

However as a whole, Seefried has succumbed to first movie syndrome and tries to tell too many stories at once in order to cover all bases. The film would have been better without the double narrative, which only confuses. The hospital interludes and the nurse could have been cut entirely or interwoven into the end of the novel.

There are also moments where the novel slips into dubious Gothic melodrama but perhaps in order to avoid a camp interpretation, Seefried never fully commits to this in the film. One wonders if the movie would have benefitted from his doing so?

But the film’s true purpose is to highlight the outrageous homophobic theories and vile procedures, now mostly forgotten, which gay men were forced to endure in the search for a remedy to their homosexuality. It succeeds in portraying this in a bold and sensitive manner. Look and learn! It was all true!