Love Lies Bleeding
Love Lies Bleeding
Kristen Stewart’s character, gym manager Lou, is first seen with her hand in a toilet full of human excreta. There is large proportion of time over the next two hours that she will end up cleaning worse than that in “Love Lies Bleeding,” directed by Rose Glass in a physically aggressive erotic love triangle but thematically brutal, violent and kinetic. Love, lies, and bleeding.
It is a blow to the gut concerning one of the most destructive factors in the odyssey of a bodybuilder steroid use, which, in the case of the film, is on steroids themselves getting braver and more musculo-cinematic with every new event that develops.
Some of the brazenly ambitious overhand punches do not quite come off with the best of execution, most notable in the fast paced ending, but it is a valid complaint because it is his film and sadly, most of it serves just to put the writing to waste.
Lou lives in one such godforsaken American town which has been forgotten in the chronicles of the American dream. In 1989, at the apex of what i would call the musclebound hero era, Glass draws tall tales of a fictional New Mexico city that seems to ensnare its residents inside a vortex of violence. In Lou’s case, her family is well-known locally because her father Zeus Lou Sr. (a wonderfully seedy Ed Harris) is quite literally the kingpin of the town.
The boss of the shooting range is smuggling shiploads over the perimeter fence and has been dumping them with his slew of enemies in the bush —including possibly Lou’s mum. Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) is also faced with battling demons, except hers are the abusive, drunk husband kind, and his name is JJ (yyyyess, a mulleted Dave Franco).
Into this environment combusts a catalyst such as Jackie (Katy O’Brian) who is a bodybuilder en route a competition in Las Vegas but makes a stopover in the gym for training. She was also not the kind of girl Lou ever had a chance to meet. Love takes a steeper turn for them wherein they alternate doses of steroids with exercise.
Jack Ryan being played by the charming handler O’Brian is like Jackie with a bunch of steroids or commitment to Lou. Each time is portrayed as more dangerous but Bruce Banner has a side to him as well.
To begin with, “Love Lies Bleeding” is advancing into the realm of crime as the protagonist Jackie comes into position of the outsider making irreversible choices almost involuntarily. It has been said that the movie is similar to “Drive” and “Thelma & Louise,” but also we felt the great “Red Rock West” and other pictures about strangers stuck in a small town for just one night rather than taking any risks fighting to stay there now and forever.
It’s only after the first few sections, when an unexpected as well as gruesome act of violence changes everything between the two protagonists Voilà and Lou That Love Lies Bleeding transforms into something great. That shines out here is that the bleak drama I am having a culinary journey on makes this turn interesting in places government regulations carry risks posing the struggle against.
It also helps that this aspect is due in part to the fact that Rose Glass hasn’t made a conventional exercise in modern noir. She’s made a film such as this one which doesn’t exploit the tropes, like the femme fatale, but rather gets more surreal and unpredictable, more like a bodybuilding steroid trip gone very wrong.
I think some of the narrative outbursts of the final act would be too much for some audiences and while I do think her character of Jackie gets somewhat swallowed up with the haze of the narrative comprehension of the role she has to perform, O’Brian is such a breath of fresh air, utilizing her body in a manner that is assertive, yet not exaggerated.
I also believe Glass is capable of going Refn light-saturated type of stylized too, and coming dangerously close to what can be perceived as excess narration but never crossing that boundary.
She purposefully makes the movie isn’t supposed to be clean, fresh, or polished but rather decays and is occupied with sweat, dirt and grunge which in fact improves the implications and the plot. (A special tag goes to a striking score from Clint Mansell.)
This being so, it also helps that an merely ok actress like Kristen Stewart would know exactly how to play her part here, which features Lou as a woman who is not just a peri and never- peradding into the world of escape but a fierce character who becomes an even larger advocate for Jackie because of her love for Sha.
It is worth noting that Lou is not a victim in this story, and Stewart does an excellent job of portraying a character that is equal parts self-assured and dainty. She even plays the cleaner (“Love Lies Bleeding” and this one, and I should love how much they focus on the fact that after violent acts violence always seems to leave mounds of mess that someone has to deal with.) It’s really good.
In both, Saint Maud and the Love Lies Bleeding, the theme of their aggression is obsession. That splendid first work was about an obsession of a different kind – the obsession with faith and religion. This is about being obsessed with everything that makes one feel powerful, especially the guns and the muscles.
She sets up these characters with very clear objectives in the film – for example Jackie wants to emerge triumphantly, Lou wants Jackie for herself, her father is power hungry etc – and then she rather interestingly dashes these characters into each other’s paths and plots in an even more bizarre narrative.
What is brought out in this particular instance, however, is the fact that chaos does not seem to loosen Glass’ grip on her directing. While these characters are all but falling away toward the horizon line, Rose Glass knows what she is doing.
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