‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Review
Rose Glass delivers again in lesbian bodybuilding neo-noir.
ROSE GLASS’S LESBIAN BODYBUILDING neo-noir Love Lies Bleeding comes on the heels of Joel Coen and Tricia Clarke’s lesbian road-trip neo-noir Drive-Away Dolls, suggesting we truly live in a golden age of darkly comic lesbian neo-noirs.
Lou (Kristen Stewart) runs the local gym where the hitchhiking drifter Jackie (Katy O’Brian) lands to pump up before hitting Las Vegas for the national bodybuilding championship. Before Jackie meets (and almost instantly moves in with) Lou, she has sex with JJ (Dave Franco), the abusive husband of Lou’s sister, Bethany (Jena Malone); in return for the sexual favor, JJ sets Jackie up with a job at a gun range owned by Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), the father of Lou and Bethany. Also in the mix are Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), a femme whose clinginess repels Lou, and an FBI agent probing Lou Sr.’s criminal empire.
Love Lies Bleeding dips its toes into several subcultures—the world of lesbian romance; the sweaty, steroid-fueled universe of body sculpting; and the underground of gun running—without obsessively diving into any of them. This is both a strength, in that it keeps the story moving (the movie has a lean 104-minute runtime), and a mild weakness, in that we don’t truly understand the joys of any of them. I suppose it’s enough to see the look of ecstasy on Jackie’s face as she’s getting her pump on or to get a quick glimpse of bodies Lou Sr. has dumped into the bottom of a crevasse.
These characters exist in the moment, in the here and the now; their backgrounds, when we catch glimpses of them, exist only to inform why they do what they do on the screen. Our first glimpse of Lou comes with her hand in a toilet, pulling out filth to get the thing running again; her hair is stringy, her face sullen. As the film progresses, we learn that she and her father aren’t on speaking terms. Flashbacks marked by a red filter are intermittently shown; Lou is cleaner cut and a little more made up, her face a grinning crimson mask as she watches a body flail backward into the crevasse. The (literal) shit duty she’s on when we see her, the strung-out look she’s adopted, the hovering FBI agents: we piece together that Lou is doing penance of a sort for the crimes she committed in her father’s employ. Whether Jackie is Lou’s chance for salvation or someone Lou will drag into the muck is at least one question the film sets out to answer, though their mutual toxicity does not lend itself to simplistic resolutions.
Kristen Stewart has demonstrated a penchant for perfectly understated comedy in her post-Twilight years, perhaps most memorably as the fast-talking nurse obsessed with a body artist in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. She brings great comic timing to the role of Lou, particularly in little moments, little delays and reactions. At one point she’s putting a body into a trunk and sees a pack of smokes, delays as if to reach for them, and then mutters “Nope,” slamming the door. Covering up a murder, yes; backsliding on her nicotine addiction, that’s where she draws the line.
And director Rose Glass has a great sense of the ways in which the horrifying can also be humorous. At one point, Lou finds a body that has been beaten so severely that half the jaw has become unhinged. Our (and Lou’s) first glimpse at the mangled face is one of revulsion; but then, the audience I saw the picture with couldn’t help but giggle as she tried to lift the body and was met with half of its head flapping around of its own volition. The whole thing is sickly humorous in its grotesquerie.
Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian are magnetic both together and separately, and Ed Harris radiates evil intensity as well as anyone on the screen ever has. Dave Franco slides into the role of onscreen indie scumbag pretty much perfectly; his JJ isn’t quite as loathsome as his brother James Franco’s “Alien” in Spring Breakers (also from distributor A24), but you can see the familial resemblance. And Jena Malone disappears into her role as the mentally and physically broken Bethany.
This is Glass’s second feature; as in her debut, Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding features a handful of moments that blur the line between personal delusion and magical realism, particularly with regard to Jackie’s steroid use. The drugs get her hyped but the hype becomes a sort of manic addiction, leading to a disastrous, mildly horrifying public spectacle that calls to mind some of the more dizzying moments from Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream. For most of the film these flashes of drug-induced insanity work within the context of a movie taking place in a recognizably real space-time of the United States circa 1989, though I think Glass loses her grip on the technique in the film’s closing moments. (You’ll, uh, know what I mean when you see it.) Whereas Saint Maud was structured so expertly and so tightly that its lead’s religious experiences could double as mental delusions—right up to the very last scorching shot before credits rolled—Love Lies Bleeding veers out of control a bit at the end in a way that, ironically, diminishes the hulking character of Jackie.
It’s a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things, and one that shouldn’t deter you from checking out the movie, though I am curious to see what general audiences make of it.
