by Elisa Giudici
LOVE LIES BLEEDING © Anna Kooris
A young woman hitchhikes along the edge of an American road, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and carrying a backpack with her belongings. Jackie or Nomi? It's just one of the passages in Love Lies Bleeding that brings to mind Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls. The two films have a lot in common, starting with a rare attitude in American cinema: looking at an "unpresentable" American reality from within, while completely abstaining from any kind of judgment, morality, or dramatic commentary. Other similarities include the dream of the Vegas show (Jackie wants to participate in a bodybuilding competition) and a constant male presence as a judge and dangerous force. Director Rose Glass demonstrates the same ability as Verhoeven to make such bold and decisive choices, with a certain taste for the quip, that the film will inevitably be divisive.
With this introduction, I don't mean to say that Love Lies Bleeding is looking to reference Showgirls...
On the contrary, the film it seems to reference the most, perhaps seeking to correct its injustices, is Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise. But the recall of Showgirls serves to underline how long it has been since a film arrived in theaters that looked directly in the eyes of this kind of corner of America without sweetening, softening, or judging it.
What America is being portrayed here? It's the other face of the 1980s, the uncomfortable, tough, violent one. There are tracksuits, shorts, and teased hair, but in this corner of America, it's guns and muscles that make noise. Not surprisingly, the focal point of the story is a gym with vaguely coercive slogans on the walls, where burly men train. Here works Lou (Kristen Stewart), a young openly lesbian woman who tries to avoid both the amorous advances of the clingy blonde Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) and her own father's attentions. Lou's father (Ed Harris) is a man as sharp as he is dangerous. He has found a way to keep his daughter nailed down in town. Lou leads a solitary life and is always on edge, fearing for her sister (Jena Malone).
When the curly-haired Jackie (Katy O'Brian) arrives in town, she naturally gravitates to the gym. Immediately, passion ignites. Lou falls madly in love but assumes Jackie is one of those curious heterosexual girls. Nevertheless her life is profoundly shaken by Jackie, who, unlike her, has traveled, has a dream, a goal, a plan.
The relationship between Jackie and Lou will be at the center of Love Lies Bleeding, a violent and erotic pulp thriller that plunges headlong into the codes and solutions of B-movies but is absolutely a high-level film. O'Brian and Stewart's performances are truly Olympian in lesbian cinema for their chemistry, understanding, but also their ability to bring out the worst in each other. Both girls have a mysterious, blood-soaked past and navigate the relationship by delving into each other's life's darkness, revealing fetishes, weaknesses, secrets. Stewart, in particular, displays disarming sincerity, in a role that she is relishing. She gives Lou an incredible range of expression, from dramatic to comedic, with continuous changes in tone.
The supporting cast is also a treat. Ed Harris is the kind of domineering father whose danger can be felt even offscreen through a telephone. Though Jena Malone, is playing an abused wife, she too shows unexpected nerve. Baryshnikov's Daisy is foolish, annoying, and irresistible.
Glass's direction emphasizes a vein of dark humor that fits perfectly with the tension of this thriller (Lou's attempts to quit smoking are a perfect punctuation) but she also brings a Cronenbergian obsession with Jackie's muscular body. In the other face of the 1980s told here, there's the use of steroid hormones, given to both Lou and Jackie, presented in an absolutely neutral l way.
The injections of hormones are tied to the most unexpected twist of the film. With everything up to the twist Love Lies Bleeding is a great film, with a certain pulp taste in showing corpses and murders but overall rooted in reality. Glass decides to raise the stakes and inserts a visionary and surreal twist, transforming the film into a sort of American urban legend. The choice is powerful and impactful, but also destined to be divisive. Personally, I found it to be the masterstroke that elevates the film.
The women share a certainingrained predisposition to solve their problems with violence. Lou and Jackie can run in a fairy-tale purple landscape, sparkling, where only unicorns are missing: they become legends, the kind that hitchhikers carry around. Their liberating, joyful run will not meet the unseen fall of Thelma & Louise's convertible. Their truck will continue to travel the roads of America. Like Nomi at Showgirls end, Jackie and Lou will continue to traverse the American routes; they have managed to climb out, together, from the crevices of the unspeakable secrets of their past as solitary women.
Love Lies Bleeding opens in the US on March 8th and in the UK on April 19th.