Carmen Emmi’s Sundance Award-winning debut feature Plainclothes, starring Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey, is now playing in New York and Los Angeles and expands to more cities over the coming weeks. Set in upstate New York in 1997, Blyth plays a young undercover cop, Lucas, who is assigned to patrol a shopping mall restroom to entrap the gay men who cruise there. Already racked with anxiety about his own sexuality and the difficult predicament he finds himself, things are complicated when he falls for one of his targets, silver fox Andrew (Tovey). The visually striking and emotionally resonant thriller moves between the past and present, as Lucas grapples with his unresolved feelings.
Despite the film’s period setting, the entrapment of men in public restrooms continues in the United States, with news breaking just this week that nearly 200 men have been arrested or detained at New York’s Penn Station, with “at least 20 immigrants taken into ICE custody”, according to reporting by Gothamist.
Speaking with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann ahead of the New York premiere of Plainclothes, writer-director Carmen Emmi shares what inspired the film, his approach to conveying anxiety through the visuals, and what it was like to shoot in his hometown of Syracuse, New York.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: I believe you got your first Hi8 video camera when you were only ten years old. What’s the draw for you of film as a storytelling medium?
Carmen Emmi: “Yeah, I did get a camera when I was 10 years old, but what I fell in love with first was actually theatre. I thought I wanted to be an actor and I’d still like to act on stage, but not on film. So it was theatre that got me into storytelling and also watching The Wizard of Oz over and over and over. I’d put on live solo performance productions of The Wizard of Oz in my basement. I would build sets and spray paint curtains. I was always obsessed with telling a story in that visual way.”
“What drew me to film was watching The Wizard of Oz and later Titanic. I started to see how the camera can be a character and I realized that I could satisfy that acting bug that I had through camera operating.”
What was your inspiration when it came to writing the screenplay for Plainclothes?
“I was inspired by a case that happened in Long Beach, California where police officers were entrapping men in a park restroom in 2014. I read an article about it in 2016, which only a few years after I came out. These feelings of anxiety started to resurface that I thought I’d resolved after I came out. But they never really went away and they came back a lot stronger.”
“I started looking inward. A lot of the work I do in therapy is to do with if I experience a feeling that takes me out of a moment, tracing it back to when and where I first felt that feeling. When I was tracing my anxiety, I found myself going back to my childhood and it landed me in 1997, which is when I set the film. I really wanted to revisit that time and to explore what it feels like to police your feelings, which was a source of my anxiety.”
It’s interesting that around that time, in 1998, George Michael’s “Outside” music video came out, which was such a fabulously defiant refusal to take on the intended shame that was being directed towards him.
“George Michael was arrested in April 1998 and I was really careful about making sure that my movie wasn’t set after that music video. But these entrapments are still going on. I was just in Long Beach for a panel and I found out that there were officers in Orange County entrapping men in a little movie theatre there in 2019. It’s shocking to me that it still continues.”
You shot the film in Syracuse. What was that like to shoot there, including the stunning movie palace location?
“That’s the Landmark Theatre, which showed silent movies when it first opened in 1928. Now it’s mostly touring theatre productions that are performed there. We made it look like a movie theatre again. I really wanted a beautiful space like that for Lucas and Andrew to have their first intimate conversation in, even though they were doing it in hiding. I wanted a space that reflected how Lucas might feel inside; golden. It was such a dream to shoot there and in Syracuse generally.”
“Syracuse is in my hometown and so many people showed up to help us. My family is all over this film. I use some of my own home video footage of my brother in the football helmet, where he plays the younger Lucas. My niece and my grandmothers all came to visit the set. That was always my dream and it was full circle and beautiful to return to the place where these feelings had started, but to come back and feel embraced and supported by the community. It was incredible. The film community in Syracuse is the best. It’s top notch. We had an incredible crew and I feel really privileged that an infrastructure like that exists in my hometown.”
The scene where Lucas and Andrew first meet in the mall restroom stall is really romantic. What was your approach to shooting that?
“I’m a romantic at heart. I know that with cruising there is a tendency to go towards the edginess, the darkness, and the mystery of it, which I love, and I wanted the film to capture that mystery too. I believe in true love and love at first sight, so in a moment where Lucas is connecting with someone for the first time I wanted him to experience that in this situation that’s normally painted in another way. What’s so cool about cruising is it really exists in the cracks of society and when I started to imagine them meeting in the cracks, I pictured this glow. That’s what I wanted to capture on screen.”
There is such great chemistry between your two leads. How did you come to cast them and what excited when you paired them together?
“In some ways, I subconsciously wrote the role for Russell. I didn’t know about Tom yet because he was new. It was a dream that they both said, ‘Yes’. I knew Tom was the right person immediately when he popped up on a Zoom call. The light was just right and it hit his eyes. So much of the main character is about acting in the eyes, which is very hard to do, and Tom does it beautifully. There’s such history in his eyes.”
“Tom and Russell made it really hard in the editing room because there are so many takes of their performances and so many choice that I wish people could see. But the ones that are supposed to be in film are in there. They were geniuses to work with. Same with the whole cast. We won the Best Ensemble at Sundance and I think it’s because everyone was so present for each other.”
The film has such a striking visual style. How you come up with that and how does it reflect some of the themes?
“It’s a movie about the surveillance of feelings. I was really inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. I loved how it depicted paranoia with zooms and its sound design. In terms of the Hi8 video footage that I incorporate, I wanted it to represent what Lucas sees. I realized that my memories from childhood were in that Hi8 format because that’s how I would capture them at the time and review them on a computer. So I wanted Lucas’ memory to look like that. I also wanted to play with the idea that when you police your feelings, maybe you’re not remembering things as they actually happened. You’re remembering a fragmented version. I also found that Hi8 is a great visual way to reflect memory because that’s how we experience it as a culture now when we look at old home videos. Erik Vogt-Nilsen, the editor, and I were really careful with how we flashed these images because we wanted it to reflect what anxiety means to us, which is the rushing of unprocessed thoughts.”
One final question for you, what’s your favorite piece of LGBTQ+ culture or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you over the years?
“The person who keeps coming up in my mind is Judy Garland. I feel like our community would agree that she is a fixture in our community. Judy has been a huge inspiration in my life. I feel such a safety with her. Despite what she may have gone through, she carried herself through the world with such humor and wit. Even though there were periods of darkness and sadness, she chose to have fun and she wanted her life to be remembered as such. I can relate to that as a queer person. Oftentimes, queer people are the funniest people that I know. They’re so witty and smart, even though we experience such darkness. I think choosing that light is is really important and I feel like she did that for us.”
By James Kleinamann
Plainclothes is now playing exclusively at New York’s IFC Center and expands to Los Angels and select theaters nationwide from Thursday, September 25th, 2025.
