Already selected eight times in Cannes, Lynne Ramsay returns to the cruise with Die, my love, adaptation of the eponymous novel by Argentinean writer Ariana Harwicz. A fifth feature film expected after eight years of absence since On Beautiful Day, film completely hammer which was controversial because of its rawness without regard for the viewer. In the light of the reactions of a part of the public at a festival called bourgeois, no doubt that Die, my love It should also divide criticism. The British filmmaker delivers a raw film showing the intimate life of a wandering couple, halfway between punks and rednecks overwhelmed by an insatiable passion. The synopsis of the festival immediately announced the colour: « Love, madness, madness, love ».
With knives drawn
From the first few minutes, we understand which path Lynne Ramsay is likely to take. A young couple enters a country house that is supposed to have been abandoned for a long time, unless it is the fruit of an inheritance. They are beautiful, young and fervoury. « You can write upstairs. » Nayly throws Jackson to his companion Grace who maps the dilapidated building, image of a couple to be rebuilt. Grace and Jackson kiss tenderly, then sharp plans follow each other and a report as playful as bestial engages under a metal sound smear that tears the eardrums. It is understood that Lynne Ramsay will let the fury of a duo of actors be expressed which is never as good as when he moves away from the big Hollywood stables.
There are two Jennifer Lawrence, the one with a polished image designed to respond to Marvel's puritan carnival and the one who dares to take on more complex roles, willingly juggling between madness and demeasurement. It is this approach that is chosen here. We find Kentucky's talented actress on a courageous project for her career as a reactionary wind blows over America. Jennifer Lawrence regains an ambitious role, close to those he is known for in A woman under influence and Mother by Daren Aronofsky, another work that divided the public widely in its time. In Die my Love, the actress with both faces gives the best of herself with a performance that might well make her win the prize of female interpretation. Grace is a woman who has an insatiable desire. Indomitable, it adopts an animal approach, expressed by a body liberated from all modesty, far from the sponcifs of submissive, soft and fragile femininity.
Grace just had a kid with Jackson, played by Robert Pattinson, barjo and looser not very mean, never far from a can of beer. The irruption of a child sets back the cards of a desire now forced by reconfiguring the structure of the couple. Subverting the expectations specific to the codes of rural life, far from urban frenzy, Lynne Ramsay shows in a few points Grace's upset psychological profile. When the young woman wanders in the fields, the camera, she, remains poached on the kitchen knife with which she plays to touch the tall herbs. Like a fawn taping in the bush, Grace moves four-legged on the ground. Behind the vegetation burned by the sun, she spies on her companion and offspring. In a fraction of a second, sexual impulse takes over from predatory instinct; Her fingers slip into her panties while she firmly holds the sharp blade of the other hand. Again, it is the Pulse of death who returns to the gallop, while Grace sneezes toward the cradle to scare her offspring.
Indomitable
In Ramsey's film, there is never a question of making a judgment in the image, which has most certainly destabilized a part of the Cannoese public, circumspect to the idea that one can appreciate a decadent character, animated by the burning fire of inner desire, raw jewel that nothing could alter, not even Jackson. Grace is the emanation of a mad desire. As a result, the scenographic system Die my love use and abuse the exhaustion effect. It is that the viewer must be struck up, constantly attacked by noise nuisances representing the ill-being and friction of young parents. The couple is consumed before our eyes, without apparent cause; These are the ubiquitous flies in the kitchen or this dog that never stops barking. They don't stand up to us as much as Grace.
Let us not be mistaken, there is no question of a literary drama such as that of Rebel weddings where Sam Mendes dealt with the delict of a 50s bourgeois couple. In Die, my loveNor is it a tragedy, in which the protagonists are paradoxically always animated by a form of hope, however precarious, to reverse the course of destiny. Grace and Jackson are struggling to keep control of the present. In other words, the possibility of a better future is a dimension they do not have access to. Anger that roars is a cold passion; The fall, an eternal controlled slip, as if it were the only way to live that they ever knew.
Die my love is not a romantic drama either; It is a volcano in perpetual eruption spitting out a thick and purulent magma that overflows with a crater too narrow. It is this rowing life that is no longer enough. Grace has nothing to do with the outside world like consumerism. Whatever the distances, she moves on foot and flies at cashiers who speak to her at the market. The couple is not exactly dysfunctional; for reason, it is not that it does not work, it is that it is perfectly incapable. Like an abscess that swells until it bursts, it is as much a permanent pain as the coming deliverance of a poison that consumes beings and only demands to spread.
It is one of the verses of René Daumal who expresses the equation of the relationship between death and desire in Die My Love : « I'm dead because I don't want ». If Grace pericles between raw madness, the impulses of death and fleshly needs, it is that she enjoys too much desire to satisfy. Now his companion has nothing to offer him desirable. He works in the day, leaves her alone, doesn't do anything, if it doesn't put beer on. Lynne Ramsay will give the metaphor throughout a conceptual film, where present, past and future merge. Ephemeral moments of joy pass away to leave only blind rage and fantasies to satisfy. Grace is a lioness who never reaches satiety.
The daughter of the fire
Contrary to what we have read in haste, this is in no way a postpartum depression, a term in vogue that flourishes in parenting journals. The word "valise" has become the new lubie to explain everything and its opposite and sometimes to better erase deeper causes. This term would imply that it is a mood disorder caused by the birth; In short, postpartum depression is associated with postnatal distress. It is a passing moment, a direct consequence of the trauma experienced by the body and the mind as a result of pregnancy, which is not the case of Grace, in whom everything leads to believe that it is her profound nature that is incompatible with material life and her alienating injunctions to work.
Grace, she does not work, at least she does not contribute to merchanting in the sense that her labour force is untapped. His only job is to keep the home at arm's length. It should also be noted that the only ratio consumed by Die, my love took place in the first minutes of the film, from the ground, driven by an animal desire that was sufficient for himself. The bodies break up in this empty house, which, once arranged, will become a prison for the young mother. Hence the interest of 1:33 format which delimits the frame of the image in a square that locks in. Let's raise the elegance of the 35mm capture that perfectly serves the raw side of the film.
It is also essential to remember the first words of Die, my love, which suggest that Grace is a writer, so an artist who by nature is associated with creativity. A creativity whose etymological sense means « to give birth, make something happen from nothing ». It is another form of birth of the spirit and not of the flesh. In this sense, carnal success counterbalances the defeat of the spirit, Grace being now unable to give birth to the letter. It is the beauty of this brief scene where, once the breast is released to breastfeed, a drop of milk escapes from the nipple and mixes with the ink of a page of his work abandoned and immediately defiled. Milk, motherhood, here undermines all creativity.
Finally, it is the dead end of an unfinished desire that is pictured by the logic of exhaustion. Beckett was exhausting language, Ramsay was exhausting the image. Die, my love disturbs, absorbs all our vital forces; an artistic choice that will not fail to inform those who have never approached the real life that Rimbaud would call absent. Against all expectations, there remains something deeply desirable in the character of Grace, where the entire outside world is showing a materialistic conformism that arouses contempt. What is sometimes coarsely called madness presents the merit of total freedom incompatible with the dogmas of a world too narrow for people like Grace or Lynne Ramsay, incomprehensive filmmaker and deeply free author.
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