 |
| All Images Courtesy: A24 |
Saint Maude director Rose Glass is back with a second feature that is just as strong and striking as her first, proving beyond a doubt that she is one of the most exciting and unique of the modern crop of young indie auteurs at A24. Love Lies Bleeding is a bold, stylish, and proudly very very queer desert-town neo-noir, narratively very much in the mold of the Coen Brothers and Cormack McCarthy, but stylistically all its own. The gritty realism of its dusty and weather-beaten small-town New Mexico setting combines with delirious and dreamlike moments of emotional expressionism to create a heady cocktail of lesbian lust and love and brutal noirish violence, powered at its center by two incredible leads. Kristen Stewart gives yet another top-notch, fearless performance, demonstrating once again why she has become one of the most exciting indie actresses of our time. And relative newcomer Katy O’Brian, in her first starring film role after a few years of supporting parts, is just as excellent. This will definitely be remembered as a defining role for both of them, and hopefully a career-launcher for O’Brian.
Lou (Stewart) and Jackie (O’Brian) are two bodybuilders brought together by lust at first sight at the gym managed by Lou in an oppressively quiet New Mexico town near the Southern border in 1989. The two begin a whirlwind romance which ignites in them the hope of escaping the town into the world of professional bodybuilding. But Lou is shackled to the town by a family with closets full of skeletons: a sadistic gun-runner father (Ed Harris, oozing menace and sleaze, and sporting one of the skeeziest haircuts in the history of cinema) who has the local police in his pocket, and an abusive brother-in-law (Dave Franco) who she is trying to protect her beloved sister (Jena Malone) from. In classic noir fashion, it doesn’t take long for these dangerous associations to start crushing down on the couple, and it doesn’t take long for someone to end up dead, with the two women suddenly needing to dispose of a body. From there things spiral further and further out of control, as their attempts to get out of the trouble they are in just dig them in deeper.
The plot is clearly inspired by loads of great neo-noirs that have come before: a bit of Blood Simple, a bit of Red Rock West, a bit of Bound, among others. But even though narrative elements are familiar, it never feels derivative, but like a very smartly-written, genre-savvy homage with a twist. With the exception of the Wachowski Sisters’ Bound, the film’s genre godmother in a lot of ways, we have rarely if ever seen a neo-noir this defiantly and proudly queer, written so strongly through a specifically lesbian lens. Even when the genre plot elements are familiar, the way we experience them here is quite different because the narrative focus is placed entirely on how the experience of it all feels to these women through the lens of their love and lust and hopes and desires; sometimes quite literally, in the film’s most emotionally-subjective expressionistic and stylized moments. Love Lies Bleeding is a very thematically dense film, which is about sexuality and desire and power dynamics in sex and gender performance as much as it is about the noirish trappings of the plot.
Film noir stories like this tend to focus on male protagonists, with women typically occupying the pretty loaded femme-fatale role, just as bodybuilding is often thought of as a male occupation, and the gun range run by Ed Harris’s villain is a very male space. This is very much a film about (among other layers) these unapologetically queer women trying to hold a space for themselves in these places, which puts them in conflict with the oppressive straight men who deny them. There are a lot of layers to unpack in the themes and characterization and power dynamics in this film, but that is definitely one of the big ones. It turns conventional Hollywood portrayals of gender, physical strength and power, and women’s sexuality on their heads in very powerful ways, with its muscular, physically commanding women who are fully empowered in their sexual desires. And their story and their desires are very much told through a queer-female gaze which feels extremely authentic and disarmingly honest; no male gaze leering at lesbians or sanitized and polite Hollywood movie-sex here. Kristen Stewart, in her provocative Rolling Stone photo shoot promoting the film, said that she wants “to do the gayest thing you’ve ever seen in your life,” and that ambition is all over Love Lies Bleeding.
It is easy to focus a lot of the attention on Stewart and O’Brian’s powerhouse performances, but Rose Glass’s outstanding direction and sense of visual style are just as crucial to the success of the film. The mix of gritty realism and delirious psychological subjectivity is as powerful as it is unusual. The cinematography capturing the dry and wind-swept New Mexico setting is absolutely gorgeous, with just the right balance of rich colors and grim bleakness. Then every now and then we get a vision from within a character’s perspective, fantasy, or memory, and the visuals become heightened: images warp in a steroid-addled fugue state, colors become beautifully hyperreal, or flashes of the horrific deeds that Harris’s villain has committed appear in black-and-red nightmare vision. The contrast is very striking, and Glass and cinematographer Ben Fordesman (Saint Maude, Out of Darkness) create wonderful images with both aesthetics. I suspect that these highly stylized flashes might be divisive among viewers, with opinions split on whether they work or not. One or two such moments didn’t fully work for me, but most of them I loved, and found to be extremely impactful; a stylistic gamble that really pays off. The score by Clint Mansell (Darren Aronofsky’s usual composer) is also excellent, and perfectly suited to Glass’s aesthetic.
With its richly layered themes, visual style, and outstanding performances, Love Lies Bleeding is an excellent entry into both the neo-noir and queer cinema canons, and a fantastic second feature for Rose Glass. While some viewers may not be as fond of the film’s more stylized and expressionistic moments, they are a fascinating artistic touch which I thought added a very unique layer, and certainly offer some room for discussion and interpretation about the film’s themes. Its queer remixing of Coen-esque neo noir tropes is fantastic, and Glass’s approach to the story and the visual style quite unique. Stewart and O’Brian really do steal the show with what I certainly imagine will be career-defining performances for them both, and the acclaim they are getting for their performances is extremely well-deserved. I highly recommend it.
- Christopher S. Jordan
Share this review!