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In 2011, Lynne Ramsay startled Cannes with her scalding portrait of mother-son relations We Need to Talk About Kevin. Now she returns to the Riviera with the no less incendiary Die, My Love — and this time we need to talk about mommy. If maternal trauma was the subtext of the Lionel Shriver-based Kevin, in this adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel it rises starkly to the surface.
Again the setting is a rundown house, the location remote rural Montana. Grace and Jackson are a young couple happily leaving New York behind, played by Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. She will be able to write uninterrupted all day, he can compose an album. Celebratory sex is had with wild abandon. Promptly, a baby arrives. The writing stops, so does the sex. Jackson hits the road to find blue-collar labour, leaving her in unsplendid isolation. His mother (Sissy Spacek) means well but is herself unravelling while other older local women shower Grace with unwanted wisdom: “Everybody goes a little loopy the first year.”
And so she self-medicates by chugging beer, masturbating compulsively and losing herself in the reverie of childish games, sometimes with a large kitchen knife. Sufficient sleep becomes a distant memory, sanity soon joining it in the rear-view. Somewhere there is a baby.
Ramsay’s jagged direction leaves us in no doubt of Grace’s mental state, but is her more erratic behaviour within the bounds of postnatal normality or something more? Who’s to judge? Certainly not a medical professional — none is consulted — so we must. Jackson for one seems unperturbed, bringing home a constantly yapping dog to perform a duet with the crying baby. The sound design is rigged to torture the audience and does so effectively. Luckily, when things get worse, Jackson has a plan: “She just needs some time to herself.”
The similarities with Darren Aronofsky’s repellent Mother! are glaring: Lawrence as a mother going through hell with a new infant and an oblivious husband. At one point she even rips a sink from the wall (a recurring source of angst in Mother!). As then, it is possible to read Die, My Love as eco fable — mother as Earth, father as neglectful Man — especially given the film’s visual leitmotifs of burning forests and mutilated animals. Unlike Aronofsky, Ramsay nudges us in such directions rather than bludgeoning us towards them. That’s not to say there won’t be bludgeoning.
Not for the first time at this Cannes, masculinity is in crisis — white masculinity in particular. Pattinson’s convincingly craven and impotent Jackson is counterpointed with a mysterious Black figure on a motorcycle (LaKeith Stanfield) whose periodic appearance unsettles Grace but who pleasures her in her fantasies. As in Kevin, there is the constant question of reliable narration: how much of what we see actually transpires?
It’s a firecracker performance from Lawrence. In many scenes, Ramsay just lights the fuse and we all stand safely back to watch her go off. The actress emits a powerful array of death stares and an even more terrifying calm, but also puts to use her terrific comic timing.
Because for all its searing psychological torment, there is a hefty dose here of jet-black comedy — and also of fairytale. The beautiful princess may well have settled down with that handsome woodcutter at the edge of the forest, but until now we never saw what happened after she had a baby.
★★★★☆
Festival continues to May 24, festival-cannes.com
