52 Films by Women Vol 8. 17. Love Lies Bleeding (Director: Rose Glass)
Five years after her
notable debut, Saint Maud, that took audiences into the delusional
mind of a tortured, lonely, self-sacrificing nurse, director Rose Glass is in
more cheerful mood with her long-awaited follow-up, Love Lies Bleeding,
a film set in the late 1980s that pays homage to Thelma and Louise.
She casts Twilight star Kristen Stewart, recently seen as
Princess Diana, in a sharply contrasting role, as Lou, a gym manager first seen
with her hand down a blocked toilet. Co-writing the script with director
Weronika Tofilska, whose credits include the television series, Baby Reindeer, Glass explores the love at first sight
romance between Lou and Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a body builder with a dark past
who is on her way to Las Vegas on her way to a contest. Lou introduces Jackie
to steroids, which has genuinely unexpected consequences.
Glass’ mood is
relative. The catalyst of the drama is domestic abuse. Lou’s sister, Beth (Jena
Malone) is married to the brutal JJ (Dave Franco, cast against type) who works
for her father. Having never left town in spite of falling out with patriarch,
Lou Senior (Ed Harris, whose bald head is framed by two long strands of hair,
tied together for appearances on a good day), Lou takes her sister’s children
to school between shifts, keeping JJ on notice, although lacking the physical
presence to do so. With their mother out of the picture – not missing or dead,
but ‘gone for twelve years’, as she pointedly tells the FBI agent, O’Riley
(Orion Carrington) who comes visiting - Lou lives a life of small mercies, in
particular a relationship with Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), her clingy, nervous girlfriend, whose
teeth are discoloured through excessive soft drink consumption. We don’t know
what Lou sees in Daisy, whose sole purpose is to put everyone on edge, but we
don’t know why Beth stays with JJ either, bearing the scars of an off-screen
flare-up.
After a night time
opening shot that shows a foreboding crevice – what other kind of crevice is
there - Glass’ camera pans down from a starry sky to follow patrons entering
Crater’s Gym, an establishment that resembles a converted warehouse where the
sweat from patrons’ bodies seems to cause the paint to peel. It is a joint that
seems to have been opened after the notoriety of the John Travolta-Jamie Lee
Curtis fitness-based romance, Perfect, albeit less than perfect, very far from it.
Signs remind patrons that ‘pain is failure leaving the body’, which is not the
way I experience plantar fasciitis. You don’t go to Crater’s Gym to hook up,
there’s a gun range for that, owned like the gym by Lou’s father. The
establishment is certainly a place for under the counter dealings, although not
only is the toilet blocked – ‘use the one at the end,’ Lou barks at an uppity
customer – but the Mountain Dew machine is broken. From her desk, Lou surveys
the gym with a resigned look.
Lou and Jackie bond
after the pair encounter a couple of meatheads in the parking lot (‘Wanna go
for a drink?’) who respond to disappointment with a slur. Jackie punches one
guy, he hits back. Lou takes Jackie to her place to administer to her nose, the
‘bleeding’ of title. The title is better understood as three separate words:
‘Love! Lies! Bleeding!’ as in Terrence McNally’s play Love! Valour! Compassion! Lou is an optimist, she has a bowl for her
cat that bears the words, ‘Happy Meal’. After hearing about Jackie’s ambition,
Lou surprises her with a case full of steroids, which she presents as an
illicit pleasure. ‘Wanna try one?’ she asks.
As meet cutes go, steroids prove more appealing than coffee and pie – Lou shows off her own muscle. It isn’t long before the pair kiss. The film’s love scene is full-on, though bodies are shown in fragments through limited lighting, a spotlight on one body part, and so on. Glass’ frame of reference is film noir, in which attraction is followed by killing, then unravelling - the tightening of the metaphorical net. The plot follows this structure.
Still courtesy of A24 Films (US) / Lionsgate (UK)
This is after Lou
learns that Jackie works for her father, waitressing at the gun range. During her
break, Jackie practices some poses. A bullet whizzes past her. ‘That’s not what
I’m paying you for,’ Lou Senior growls, adding, ‘since you’re here, may as well
show the place.’ He stands behind her as he encourages Jackie to squeeze the
trigger real softly. ‘Much harder than a punch’, he tells her, after Jackie
hits the target with resounding accuracy. ‘I prefer my body,’ Jackie insists.
Jackie knows her own
strength and isn’t afraid to use it, sneaking into JJ’s house and surprising
him at night, smashing his jaw against a table (the result is horribly
disfiguring). As she administers justice, Jackie towers over him, larger than
life, an image that is repeated – and enhanced - to equally jaw dropping
effect.
Love Lies Bleeding
is certainly visceral, but it
fails in one key area. There is no spark between the two women. This might be a
love story, but it is one in which Lou locks Jackie in a house in order to get
her to lie low. Before that, there is the small matter of the body. Lou cleans
up JJ’s house and hides in the wardrobe as her father and his associate come
looking for him. Fortunately, Lou isn’t discovered but not before Lou Senior
walks towards the wardrobe then turns away - a familiar suspense cliché.
Touching a kitchen surface, Lou Senior looks surprised, but he doesn’t rush to
a conclusion.
Lou knows a place where the body can be stashed, having wrapped it up in a rug and stashed it in the boot of JJ’s car. ‘Take my truck,’ she tells Jackie. On the way, they encounter Daisy, who slams herself against Lou’s driver-side window in a drunken haze. Lou, ever cool, fobs her off, but then Daisy notices that someone is driving Lou’s truck, and that they didn’t go around her while she was standing in the road.
In true film noir
style, Jackie pushes the car into the crevice. Lou wants the body to be
discovered, so tosses a lighted something into the crevice to torch the car,
having earlier placed the business card of an investigating FBI agent into JJ’s
cold dead hand. The smoke from the ignited car can be seen for miles around.
The Feds will surely discover it and see what else is down there. In one of the
film’s most vivid images, an overhead shot tracks two black FBI cars as they
head towards the crevice. Each car wobbles from side to side as they head down
the uneven road.
Jackie doesn’t know
the meaning of the word lying low and heads for the gym. She just wants to get
out of town, to drive with Lou to Las Vegas and take part in the competition.
After the Feds discover what else is in the crevice – the bodies of Lou
Senior’s missing business associates – Lou Senior shifts into damage control
mode, aided by the inevitable corrupt cop who surprises Lou, gun blazing.
Throughout the film,
Lou struggles with her smoking habit, listening to a tape that informs her that
she is inhaling poison. It’s not an effective treatment, but nevertheless she
resists nicotine, telling Daisy who offers her a joint that she has quit. Daisy
has a means by which she can bind herself to Lou. This makes her a loose end.
The 1980s setting
recalls the decade when feminist cinema hit the mainstream. Stars such as
Kathleen Turner, Sigourney Weaver and Glenn Close and, later (in the 1990s)
Sharon Stone and Linda Fiorentino, showed how tough women could be. There is a
specific reference to the Berlin Wall coming down, the destruction of a
barrier. In setting the film in the past, Glass gives herself licence to
reinvent it. At the film’s climax, she pulls off a genuine coup de cinema,
offering a bold, fantastic image that recalls a 1950s science fantasy film. To
her credit, we go with it since it is pre-figured in earlier stylizations.
Still courtesy of A24 Films (US) / Lionsgate (UK)
The film also has a
1970s point of reference, specifically the television series The Incredible Hulk, which featured body builder Lou Ferrigno as
the titular alter ego. In that series, transformations were prefigured by the
tearing of shirts, an image repeated here when Jackie’s anger builds.
In recalling the
neo-noirs of the 1980s, which recreated film noir of the 1940s but were much
more explicit, Glass pushes the genre forward, being more explicit still than
1980s and early 1990s Hollywood cinema. In 1991, in another film about domestic
abuse and killing, the titular Thelma
and Louise weren’t allowed to
get away with it. Glass challenges that. Her film ends differently. It also
replaces plot twists with image twists, situating women’s cinema as literally
outside the mainstream. Both Saint
Maud and Love Lies Bleeding share bold visceral endings, but the latter
celebrates liberation, framed by the stars but coming back to earth.
Reviewed at Curzon Riverside, Canterbury, Southern England, Friday 3 May 2024, 21:30 screening
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