Behind the counter of the gym she manages for her father in the middle of the Nevada desert, Lou seems to be dreaming of elsewhere. Anywhere, we guess. Clinging to her routines like a castaway to a buoy, the young woman yearns for something without really knowing what exactly. Then emerges from the night a strange hitchhiker: Jackie. A passing weightlifter, Jackie falls in Lou’s eye, and vice versa. What follows is an escalation of love and murder complicated by the fact that Lou’s father is a dangerous gangster. In the stripper Love Lies Bleeding (Of love and blood), by Rose Glass, Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian form a couple as sultry as they are lethal.
After a rightly celebrated first film, the psychological horror drama Saint Maud, in which an unstable nurse convinces herself that her invalid boss is possessed, Rose Glass once again focuses on a female duo that goes awry. The approach here, on the other hand, is much more “pulp”, as if the filmmaker had adapted a station novel with a joyfully outrageous violent and erotic content.
Gold, Love Lies Bleeding is based in this case on an original screenplay co-written by the filmmaker and Weronika Tofilska. In addition to the motif of the female tandem, already present in his award-winning short film Room 55Rose Glass revisits many elements of its long precedent: the repression of strong emotions which results in a bloodbath, psychosis as a fatal valve, desire combined with the feminine plural…
With the notable difference that, this time, said desire is assumed and consummated. Thus Lou and Jackie experience the intoxication of a carnal and fusional romance. Which romance changes after the death of a man. Through this first murder (there will be others), the filmmaker establishes the influences of film noir which are immediately perceptible, having fun subverting or diverting the codes of the venerable genre.
As Rose Glass told us in an interview recently, this referential field took on a little of its own accord after an old photo from the 1940s and 1950s showing a weightlifter struck the director’s imagination. This explains this, his film is bathed in a somewhat timeless atmosphere. The action takes place at the very end of the 1980s, but the style has a certain “Edwardhopperesque” je ne sais quoi, very 1940s-1950s, precisely.
About these eras: discerning film buffs will recognize a diffuse homage to Desert Hearts, by Donna Deitch. This classic of LGBTQ+ cinema published in 1985, but set in the 1950s in a desert town in Nevada (well), tells the story of the budding love between two dissimilar women…
Sensual, bloody and squeaky
Very stylized, the staging of Rose Glass is never mannered. The kinetic energy deployed (punctuated here and there by dreamlike inserts as in Saint Maud), the shots at pronounced angles and the bill “ glamour filthy” are in perfect tune with the proposition.
Added to all this is a gallery of secondary characters variously “awful, dirty and nasty”, starting with the local godfather played with chilling calm by the always excellent Ed Harris.
The film, however, belongs to Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian, as unwilling criminal lovers. In the role of Lou, the first undoubtedly delivers the best performance of her career, between displayed vulnerability and hidden dangerousness. As for the second, she infuses Jackie with an animal grace in tune with the character’s unpredictable temperament.
The result is a furiously sensual and bloody neonnoir, with a grating humor at times, and ultimately supremely entertaining.