Love Lies Bleeding (Of love and blood in French version) by Rose Glass (Saint Maud) is a joyful cocktail of sex, blood, violence and revenge, in an irresistible retrokitsch package.
The second feature film by the 34-year-old British author-filmmaker tells the story of the romantic passion between two young women at the end of the 1980s, thwarted by a particular criminal context.
Lou (Kristen Stewart), who runs a gym in a remote New Mexico village, falls in love with Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an ambitious penniless bodybuilder on her way to a competition in Las Vegas. Jackie has a troubled and mysterious family past, just like Lou, who is the daughter of an arms dealer hunted by the FBI (Ed Harris). The relationship between the two women will have bloody consequences.
Presented as a world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year then at the Berlin International Film Festival last February, Love Lies Bleeding happily and successfully combines several genres: romantic thriller, film noir, fantasy comedy.
It is a satire that is at once funny, violent, gripping and astonishing, which sometimes recalls the cinema of the Coen brothers, sometimes that of Michael Mann – in particular for its typical aesthetic of the 1980s –, Longueuil cuts and music by Bronski Beat at support.
The romance between Lou – short for Louise – and Jackie is not without consequences for those around them. Jackie found work at Lou’s father’s gun club, thanks to her brother-in-law (Dave Franco), an abusive and unfaithful husband. Family tensions are exacerbated, particularly between the daughter and the father, who are already at odds.
PHOTO ANNA KOORIS, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ed Harris in Love Lies Bleeding
Movie badass
Rose Glass and her co-writer Weronika Tofilska have fun deconstructing clichés (about the family, the couple, gender stereotypes) and playing with the codes of cinema in this romantic, queer and feminist thriller, inventive, supercharged and surreal, which does not seem to be burdened by any constraints (formal or credibility of the story, in particular).
Kristen Stewart embodies with her usual restraint the mystery and anxiety in the face of her life tipping into the unknown. Katy O’Brian imposes a magnetic presence with her physique. The chemistry operates between these two impulsive characters, at the heart of a pulp fiction as we like them, with sordid humor, gratuitous violence and torrid sex. “Love is my drug,” sang Bryan Ferry on Love Is the Drug.
Rose Glass imposes a frantic pace and crazy ideas on Love Lies Bleedingmovie badass, completely uninhibited, who takes risks and is not afraid of breaking his face. To our greatest delight.
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Romantic thriller
Love Lies Bleeding (V.F.: Of love and blood)
Rose Glass
Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Ed Harris
1:44 a.m.