Kristen Stewart in a muscular and subversive lesbian thriller

The second feature film by British director Rose Glass, “Love Lies Bleeding” offers a film noir, a skillfully reinterpreted genre. The film was presented at the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlinale.

With his first feature film Saint Maud, a psychological horror drama who won the Grand Prix at the Géradmer International Fantastic Film Festival in 2020, British director Rose Glass had already announced her desire to reinterpret certain codes relating to the genre in which the film is distinguished. Love Lies Bleeding, whose theatrical release is scheduled for Wednesday June 12, 2024, this time offers a subversion of film noir, notably featuring lesbian protagonists.

Somewhere in 1980s New Mexico, Lou (Kristen Stewart) runs a seedy gym. The establishment belongs to his father, an arms dealer played by Ed Harris. Frequented only by men, the place suddenly becomes the haunt of Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a bodybuilder who crosses the United States to go to a bodybuilding competition organized in Las Vegas. While the two women immediately fall in love, their story is weakened by old family conflicts and a long list of corpses.

Arid lands, desert cities and rock faults: Love Lies Bleeding takes its roots in the mythical landscapes of the American West. By plunging into this environment characteristic of a whole section of cinema across the Atlantic, Rose Glass seizes the archetypes of the plot of film noir.

Kristen Stewart plays the antihero with a dreary existence, Katy O’Brian the vagabond whose arrival triggers chaos: together they form the very traditional criminal couple. The feminine gender of the protagonists, like the heroines of famous lesbian thriller Bound (1996) sisters Wachowski, On the other hand, it opens up a whole new narrative field.

This reassignment of the identity of canonical characters produces images rarely seen in cinema, and is indeed not a simple exercise in style. Around this duo, the screenplay works on the question of violence specific to thrillers from another perspective.

Abusive father, husband hitting his wife: the cascade of violence is born from a patriarchal environment that is both an object of revolt and a factor of impregnation. Because Lou and Jackie, and this is perhaps one of the great successes of the film, fight for their freedom but willingly draw on the legacy of this violence. In Love Lies Bleeding amorality mixes with the desire for justice and strengthens the comedy of a resolutely renewed black cinema.

Receiver and actor of violence, the female body depicted by Rose Glass also touches on the transgressive. Jackie, the character played by Katy O’Brian, practices bodybuilding at a high level. His body does not approach any standard, constantly evolving. Around the muscles, the British director asserts herself in the body horror, subgenre already worked in Saint Maud and films uninhibited queer eroticism.

Love Lies Bleeding, whose heart of the plot is the love story between Lou and Jackie, is constructed far from the realism and the pain that lesbian women are often confronted with in fiction. No hindered or hidden romance, the film flirts with the fantastic, multiplies the references to LGBT culture, offers a subversive but happy representation. In short, a sort of Thelma and Louise on steroids and without subtexts, in which, for once, women are not necessarily the ones who end up in a ravine.

The sheet

Gender : Romance, Thriller
Director: Rose Glass
Actors: Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco and Ed Harris.
Country : England, United States
Duration : 1h44 min
Exit : 2024
Distributer : Metropolitan FilmExport
Synopsis : Lou, a lonely manager of a gym, falls madly in love with Jackie, an ambitious bodybuilder. Their passionate and explosive relationship will lead them, despite themselves, into a spiral of violence.