In an early scene in Lynne Ramsay’s brutal, beautiful Die, My Love, we see Jennifer Lawrence crawling through a sunny, grassy field on all fours, low to the ground like a sultry panther, as we hear a baby crying somewhere nearby—it turns out he’s been parked, safely, on a porch. We don’t know what Lawrence’s precise, feral belly crawl means—did I mention that she’s clutching a kitchen knife in one hand?—except somewhere in our gut we do know. The animal thing that drives us to pair up, to have sex, to fall in love, is the precursor to the adored pink being crying on the porch, the living, wailing, needy thing you’d do anything for. Unchained desire makes you feel alive; it also makes you feel a little crazy. And then, sometimes, whether you want it or not, suddenly there’s a zygote.
Die My Love, playing in competition here at the Cannes Film Festival, is about something no one wants to talk about: not just postpartum depression, but full-on madness for which there’s no cure, not even temporary relief. In the real world, it would be diagnosed as psychosis, but Ramsay’s film, adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s slender scalpel of a novel, isn’t about symptoms, causes, or treatments. It’s about pure feeling, including both suffering and elation, highs and lows that ought to balance one another but somehow don’t. It’s also the most complex, unsettling, and bleakly funny performance Lawrence—who has been a fine, persuasive, charming actor since the beginning—has given.
In the movie’s opening sequence, we see a young couple exploring the interior of a somewhat dilapidated house in the country. We can hear their voices and see their bodies, but we have no sense of their faces. They’ve just inherited the house from the man’s uncle; it’s a whole different ball game from New York, the man tells the woman. Before long, they’re having untamed, earthy, grunting, laughing, rock’n’roll sex on the floor. By the time we see their faces—their names are Grace and Jackson, and they’re played by Lawrence and Robert Pattinson—there’s a baby on the way, soon to become an actual baby, crying on the porch, with Grace crawling toward the sound, or perhaps simply trying to crawl away from something else.
Grace hasn’t turned against her baby—in fact, the exact opposite. He’s the one she feels she needs to protect and nurture. She’s attuned to his cries as if they were issuing from her own throat. But she breast-feeds him with a blank look in her eyes; he’s draining her dry, though her emptiness isn’t his fault, and she seems to know it.
Jackson is away for long stretches at his unspecified job, and even when he’s at home, he seems so preoccupied with being a good dad, or a good something, that he doesn’t give her what she needs. We see her yanking her pants aside and masturbating furtively in the bedroom; she saws away mindlessly, not to conjure pleasure or even release, but simply to make something else go away, as if she were wishing herself into negative space.
On the drive back from his job one night, Jackson calls her from a diner; her jealousy takes over, and she pictures him having sex with a blowsy, overly made-up waitress of the imagination. Later, in real life, she finds a packet of condoms in the glove compartment of the family vehicle. Jackson explains them away, but she sees them as the reason he hasn’t touched her in ages, hasn’t given her what she needs. He loves music; he turns the radio up. She yells at him to turn it off. “I hate guitars!” she says, and it’s hilarious, but also a signal that something is off. Because, as the bewildered Jackson says in response, Who hates guitars?
Sometimes Grace is capable of manic pleasure: we see her, alone in her lonely house with its ditsy floral wallpaper, dancing like a teenager to Toni Basil’s “Mickey.” But mostly she fills her days with a kind of rattling, desperate emptiness. She wheels the baby down a country road to Jackson’s mother’s house nearby. Jackson’s mom is played by Sissy Spacek, radiantly sympathetic but also clueless. She sees that Grace hasn’t been herself, whatever herself might mean, since the baby was born. She innocently asks Grace how she starts her day. With a cup of hot water with lemon? Yoga? She thinks yoga might help Grace feel better; there’s an instructor nearby; she can do it online. Blah, blah, blah. “Let me help you, sweetie,” she implores kindly, though the futility of what she’s trying to do somehow makes us recoil too. What is she thinking? Can’t she see, as we do, that Grace is beyond all that?
Jackson tries to help too, but he’s flailing. At one point he brings home a dog, a nervous wire-haired little thing who barks constantly; we never even see his face. (Dog lovers should know that this dog isn’t around for long, but Ramsay is discreet and smart about how she presents his death. It’s not a cheap, manipulative, feel-bad moment.) You feel sympathy for Jackson, but you’re a little angry with him too: even the way he wears socks and slides with the floral bathrobe he and Grace seem to share makes you want to roll your eyes. He’s a clueless, useless sweetheart. When Grace becomes so angry, so untethered, that she tears at the wallpaper in her home until her fingers bleed, you know exactly where she’s coming from, even if you don’t want to go there yourself.
All of this must make Die, My Love sound like torture, the sort of cinema of unpleasantness you’d do well to run a mile from. But Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay—whose last film was 2017’s striking You Were Never Really Here, which also debuted at Cannes—never gives us the simple, predictable thing. Die, My Love is a kind of black comedy, bitterly funny even as it wrings unbidden emotions from us. It’s gorgeous to look at, a kind of back-to-the-land reverie, complete with wildflower-dotted fields and happily bizzing bees, that also feels like a kind of cosmic hell. We don’t always know what’s real and what’s fantasy—there’s a small subplot involving a sexily helmeted LaKeith Stanfield on a motorbike—but that hardly matters. Ramsay, working with master cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, builds a world of images that’s hypnotic one minute and jolting you awake the next. Die, My Love is somehow both jagged and graceful. There’s no other movie on the landscape like it, which is probably a good thing, because you really need only one.
And it works because it invites us to walk with Grace rather than judge—or, God forbid—diagnose her. She often laughs inappropriately, yet we usually know why. When she and Jackson show up at a neighborhood party—it’s the first time you consider that this couple, seemingly so isolated, might actually have friends—and she enters a roomful of parental-types clutching wine or beer glasses and chatting amiably as their kids engage in healthy hooliganizing outside, you feel Grace’s sense of dislocation as keenly as she does. She’s confronted by groups of smiley wives with shiny cheeks who can talk about nothing but their children, their feelings about their children, how their children drive them cray-zee, and they’re probably not even exaggerating. They too could be Grace; luckily, they’re not. Grace recoils from them, and we do too. The movie, and this performance, puts us on her side, even though we know this character is heading into places where we can’t follow.
Lawrence has had children herself, and her body shows it. She’s no movie-star stick-figure; she has a dreamy earthiness, like a Rembrandt nude. Her face is round and plaintive; she’s vulnerable-looking, like a baby Ellen Barkin. And as Grace, she goes not just to the edge but beyond it. This is the kind of performance people call “fearless,” for lack of a better word—I’m sure there is a better word, but who knows what it is? What Lawrence does in Die, My Love is so delicately textured, even within its bold expressiveness, and its fiery anger, that it leaves you scrambling for adjectives. It’s the kind of performance you go to the movies for, one that connects so sympathetically with the bare idea of human suffering that it scares you a little. But none of that should scare you off Die, My Love. True, it takes a little courage to face it. But weirdly, by the end, this movie makes you feel more exhilarated than drained. At its heart, it’s classic l’amour fou, but for one not two—the ultimate expression of what it means to be dancing with yourself.
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