Lou, an employee of a gym club, falls in love with Jackie, an ambitious bodybuilder who prepares the competition of her dreams in Las Vegas. This passionate encounter goes from thread to needle precipitate them into a spiral of violence where intertwined desires, revenge and steroids. Production A24 that was expected on firm foot, which is worth Love Lies Bleeding Rose Glass, to whom it was already to be noticed Saint Maud ?
Blood and tears
After the mixed Civil War, too calibrated for the general public and contrary to the spirit of the A24 prods, one might have feared that Love Lies Bleeding suffer the same fate. At the beginning of the game, be assured, we are at the opposite side of the superficiality of Graland's bourrin film. Rose Glass's film is first worn by a OST Unpublished composed by the excellent Clint Mansell which is never as good as when it produces tortured soul and body themes. This was the case for Requiem for a dream, The Wrestler or Black Swan : three films based on performance, if not exhaustion of the bodies pushed into their last cuts.
The other part of the soundtrack contains memorable tubes from popular culture and became canonical in cinema: Nice Mover (1978), Mutant Man (1982) or Smalltown Boy (1984). To this are added more contemporary titles nevertheless carried by the synths and the same vibe Electronics of Harald Grosskopf. It is also one of his songs which inaugurates with brilliantly incredible opening scene. On this point Glass follows the line of Tarantino or Kojima, namely authors whose OST is an integral part of their artistic genome.
The first minutes of Love Lies Bleeding Let us discover the universe of this very testosterone gym where Lou works, incarnate with accuracy by Kristen Stewart. The camera swings from the sky to this strength club where pain is forbidden in the pure tradition of pure virility juice. Close-up on sweaty men's bodies, saturated biceps of hemoglobin: tone set. These athletes struggle to build a silhouette for themselvesHeroes action. Between the dumbbells of some and the boxers in the background, the dedication is total. Cyclists seem to beat the pace of Grosskopf's 1847 song. Like machines operated by inexhaustible pistons, they form one and all, galvanized by performance.
« The body embodies the will of the mind », « No bread no gain », « We decide his fate », « pain is weakness that leaves the body »... the images speak to us via its excessive maxims on each wall. At the four corners of the club, these mantras proudly and almost religiously reign. Signs that are not annoid since all this training is intended to change beings beyond their carnal envelope. It is about aiming at the stars that were seen as the first inaugural image. Overstep the carnal banality. And at the very end of the sequence, women (finally) are also part of the workings of these single machines whose breath is thought to be haletant. A strong scene that immediately turns to those toilets blocked by the shit that Lou has to clean... from which to descend immediately on Earth.
The body embodies the will of the mind
Throughout the film, Rose Glass swore to reverse our mental images starting with the introduction of Jackie played by Katy O的Brian (Ant-Man, The Mandalorian and soon Mission Impossible 8), an actress whose career is as tumultuous as that of his character. A martial arts champion from a very young age, the young Indianapolis woman even worked in the Carmel police department before turning into a sports coach and making a career in... bodybuilding! In Rose Glass's film, Jackie gives way to Lou's insistent proposals to take steroids in injection, a disturbing element of a story and instigator of the upcoming violence. Ironically the actress would have stopped the sporting competition in real life because she did not want to take steroids as tacitly requires discipline. Naturally secreted by man, these hormones are, beyond their doping properties, responsible for sexual differentiation, which will not escape anyone as to the eruption of the violence associated with it in the continuation of the film.
Where works like Bullhead or The Wrestler Sensuously embraced the issue of self-overtaking through d'anabolic consumption, Rose Glass chose a much more metaphorical and hyperbolic approach. The muscular body (already) of Katy O We must see this scene where the actress proudly walks in the middle of a shooting stand with a tight blue tank top. It is impossible not to think of Lara Croft, a hypersexualized figure created in an attempt to seduce the 1990s teenager, in a world where advertising sexism was omnipresent.
Rose Glass multiplies the references of our collective imagination by bringing his own signature. Jackie's curly hair blooms in the 70s and 80s. Our unconscious reminds us of the archetype of the strong heroin of the time as Ellen Ripley was. And his name may be secretly referring to Jackie Brown, an air hostess who served in parallel as a gun dealer in Tarantino's eponymous film. Certainly Love Lies and Bleeding is a contemporary echo of Thelma and Louise where two women on the run responded with arms to male violence. Ridley Scott's film, also at the crossroads of genres, had aroused controversy for its subversive character, its irreverent fiber and intimately to the bottler vis-à-vis the defied patriarchate. The absolute fusion towards and against the violence of men is equally valid for Thelma and Louise for Love Lies Bleeding.
In this temple of manhood represented by the gym, the bodies of men filmed by Rose Glass seem almost empty compared to Jackie's. With her smile that illuminates her face and jacket straight out of the 80s, Jackie surprises in this world of men. With its boxer shorts, the high cut and its red and white stripes that immediately recall Rocky Balboa, Jackie is the archetype of the will. Very tarantine in its unfolding in which violence is systematically represented by freedom, Love Lies Bleeding Revisits one by one the history of modern cinema to better reverse our performances, starting with the praise of power and virilism dear to the action cinema of the 1980s and which is still found today in the majority of Hollywood superproductions.
Love Lies Bleeding revisits the genus(s)
Love Lies Bleeding full of scenes mounted to the image of the training clips Rocky and all its variations. However, the whole approach ostentatiously assumes the desirable character of the exercise thanks to the relationship maintained with Lou (no return here). The two actresses deliver a stunning performance, far from the clichés of softness of what some think is a single and same vision of a supposed monolithic feminine essence. Some debates around a female look sometimes focus on gender-specific attributes, paradoxically feeding the patriarchal conceptions of what a woman should be.
A stalemate that imprisons and would amount to subjugating questionable stereotypes, particularly about sexuality and so-called female values per se, while the sociological factors of our social construction should undoubtedly be criminalised. Love Lies Bleeding is located through the male and Female gauze he strikes face to face to reveal the conceptual limits with intelligence. Lou and Jackie's relationship is toxic as heterosexual relationships can be. Lou is possessive and cultivates a form of jealousy fantasized of his friend's past, a well-known configuration of couple disputes where the Man sniffs from the past sexual freedom of his spouse. Following a yelling, Lou follows Jackie by slowly driving her car, a memory image par excellence where the woman seeks to pull out of the male grip. Trust is finally seriously undermined when Lou receiver Jackie... to protect her. Inevitably, their passionate relationship is turning to violence.
Another well-known example, Jackie does not formally claim to be a lesbian according to her own claims, while Lou warns her that she does not want to be a lesbian. « straight who just wants to experiment » (old reducing adage of a desire that one would like to direct). Nor is their sexuality the fruit of other fantasies, as one has been able to blame - wrongly or rightly - for their sexuality. Kechiche. The director had indeed captured an incalculable number of times the debates of Léa Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos for a questionable sequence as to his intentions.
In Rose Glass's film, on the contrary, we see an authentic female gaze deprived of moral injunctions that some would wrongly want to attribute to him. These natural scenes amuse stereotypical conceptions of a sexuality exclusively focused on passive/active notion and its obvious totem, penetration, long erected as man's exclusive prerogative. Some relationships take on the shape of predatory quotes; others flirt between ludism and voyeurism as so many variations of a passionate libido.
Force as virtue, virtue as force
In Latin, the word Virility refers to « all physical characteristics of adult man which constitutes sex ». Etymology of virilitas refers to Vir, which designates man as opposed to woman. The word also includes the notion of strength, not only physical but also mental. Therefore force would be a characteristic by male nature. Rose Glass tries to detangle this sexist contradiction up to the point of etymon, the latter inducing a physical superiority of « strong sex » separating beings. And it's probably on this point that Love Lies and Bleeding is the most interesting since it frees the genres. Strength is no longer only man's own but an ideal that the body incubates. The latter « embody the will of the spirit ». The will would therefore prevail over the carcan of the genre.
Rose Glass demonstrates a decomplex freedom of formal realism to represent the emotions of her characters through herculean transformations of her heroine. In search of permanent exceedance and despite the deliberately outrageous psychotropic effect of steroids, Jackie is as big as a colossus on screen during a crazy scene that recalls the solar goddess of the incredible song clip Sphynx Group Women. The proportions are no longer correct as in these cartoons which were briefly seen at the beginning of the film. Only signification counts and whatever realism matters. It is in this sense that the film succeeds in reviving with the more common sense of virtue, a mixture of energy, moral strength and courage, of which the same etymon is found. The scene of egg yolks thrown in the trash can be read with a double reading; the quest of mass obviously but also the separation of the male and female attributes, the yellows returning directly to the eggs.
Last sign revealing and not least, Lou's father incarnate by Ed Harris is the tutelary and unhealthy figure to be cast down according to the Freudian image we know. Every appearance of the father is overwhelming, despite Jackie's confidence and determination. Owner of the gun club, he embodies the all-power and does not need to know his strength unlike Jackie. Just pressure on the trigger is enough. It is the symbol of patriarchy in all its splendor. As for Lou's violent brother-in-law, his psychology is no more joyful. In reality Lou and Jackie are never as free as when they are separated from men.
Thanks to the jury for letting the monsters in.
Love Lies Bleeding recalls Titanium (read our critical) by its ability to question gender functions. One thinks of this cult scene of the film of Ducournau where, raised on a truck, Alexia dances, grimmed as a man, in front of the angry firemen. The latter appear disturbed by his clumsy sensuality, unable to redefine their desires in the face of this silent and degenerate dance. A nosefoot at the introduction of the film, where men were watching women hang out on a Cadillac (variation of the cinema pulp of Boulevard de la Mort to Sin City). The lubricated desire transvestite in the closed and virilist environment of the barracks was, however, disturbing because more intimate, subject to the spectre of a two-sided identity and which was thought irremediably genrée.
Here we find this same dynamic which reaches its climax with the fantastic performance of Katy O There's even a nod to the film Men which bare the toxic masculinity. The codes of bodybuilding are then subverted and transfigured by the dance and beauty of Jackie's gesture, so intriguing that even the camera turns to the image. Cherry on the cake of a film that seems to royally free itself from standards to better subvert them, it is the dance therefore art that resumes possession of the bodies. When Julia Ducournau handed over her golden palm three years ago, she asked us collectively: « Thank you. The jury let the monsters in » Did she leave as a deliverance before adding:
« The monstrosity that scares some and goes through my work is a weapon, a force to push back the walls of the normativity that locks us up and separates us. »
Rose Glass's film fits perfectly into this line of fascinating heroine films and complex psychology. Waited for 12 June 2024 at the cinema, no doubt that Love, Lies and Bleeding the public and critics should react. While the Cannes festival just started for MaG, we would have been curious to see how Rose Glass's pulp story would have been welcomed if it had been presented on the cruise. Because Rose Glass meticulously deconstructs our representations, he would have had, like Titane, his detractors. Film punch and liberating, touching and incisive, Love Lies Bleeding Is he our Thelma and Louise Modern?
Trailer for Love Lies Bleeding
I finally saw it! A very beautiful staging with a very aesthetic image, the opening plan creates an atmosphere that will no longer leave us, monochrome portraits with red gelatin and ultra violent of certain scenes evoking somewhere among others the cinema of Winding Refn. Ed Harris in the father's role is amazing! Definitely, a lot of stuff that's been coming out of A24 in the last few years is so much slamming!