How you’re feeling about “Love Lies Bleeding” will rely largely on how you’re feeling about its ending.
Don’t fear, no spoilers right here. However let’s characterize the form of oddball scenario we’re speaking about.
Think about watching an erotic thriller for 90 minutes solely to have it flip right into a sci-fi fantasy. Think about watching a drama that turns into, on the final minute, a comedy. Think about watching a film that asks to be taken significantly all through, however then switches gears and broadcasts that it has all been a joke.
To evaluate an expertise like that, you’d need to ask your self some questions: Is writer-director Rose Glass inept or audacious? Or audaciously inept? My sense is that Glass wrote her characters right into a gap after which threw up her arms and took the primary ending that introduced itself to her. However I may very well be fallacious. She may have been heading there the entire time.
Both means, the filmmaker’s intention finally issues lower than a person viewer’s response, and this particular person viewer determined to love “Love Lies Bleeding” and the place it goes — although with reservations. What tipped it towards the constructive aspect for me is that this film is peculiar in methods you most likely received’t overlook.
“Love Lies Bleeding”: Erotic thriller. Starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian and Ed Harris. Directed by Rose Glass. (R. 104 minutes.) In theaters Friday, March 15.
It’s subtly bizarre from the start. A gap shot follows a lady from behind as she walks down a road and enters a bodybuilding fitness center. At that time, the film cuts from her and we by no means see her face or know who she is. Certain, a director is allowed to do this, nevertheless it’s an odd means to make use of invaluable time at the beginning of a film, to fake to be introducing characters as an alternative of really introducing characters.
“Love Lies Bleeding” is about within the Eighties, and it’s trustworthy to the period, with loads of drum machines on the soundtrack. Katy O’Brian (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) performs Jackie, a bodybuilder with a resemblance to Rachel McLish, who was featured in “Pumping Iron II: The Girls” (1985).With bodybuilding at its peak within the ’80s, this makes Jackie one thing of a bodily best of her time, which is strictly what she’d be to Lou (Kristen Stewart), a skinny, shy lesbian whose one concession to well being and health is her hopeless effort to stop smoking.
Jackie is ebullient however mysterious, whereas Lou is reserved and but an open e-book. O’Brian holds her personal, however Stewart is the linchpin and heart of the film, and many of the enjoyable of “Love Lies Bleeding” is in watching her assume. Like a variety of Stewart heroines, Lou is watchful, paranoid with good cause, nervous by nature, however able to excessive habits.
At first, Lou is worried about holding on to her new girlfriend, who is absolutely simply passing via on her strategy to a Las Vegas bodybuilding competitors. However quickly there are different issues apart from romance. As a lesbian thriller, the film calls to thoughts the Wachowskis’ “Sure” (1996), although “Love Lies Bleeding” is clumsier and extra spontaneous, as if it had been being made up on the spot.
Although the spontaneity finally exhausts itself, it’s satisfying many of the means. Glass positively has a humorousness that’s mirrored in a few of Stewart’s idiosyncratic line readings in addition to within the grotesque, needy, orange-toothed character of Daisy, a lover of Lou’s, performed by Anna Baryshnikov (daughter of the famed ballet dancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov) with a refreshingly full absence of vainness.
However the purest distillation of Glass’ deadpan playfulness is Ed Harris’ head of hair. He performs Lou’s father, a really dangerous man who owns a taking pictures vary and goes round with hair that’s virtually inconceivable to search out in nature. He’s completely bald on prime, however his aspect hair is lengthy, luxuriant and superbly conditioned, like that of Christie Brinkley or different fashions from the interval. It’s a marvel Harris stopped laughing lengthy sufficient to movie his scenes.
Attain Mick LaSalle: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com
