At first, it’s crazy love. Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), young New Yorkers, enthusiastically settle into a dilapidated old house in Montana, inherited from a distant relative. A big empty house, ghostly, where everything is falling apart – the floor, the tapestries… Grace and Jackson see it as a new beginning, a future to build together.
He composes, on the guitar…
At the beginning, it’s crazy love. Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), young New Yorkers, enthusiastically settle into a dilapidated old house in Montana, inherited from a distant relative. A big empty house, ghostly, where everything is falling apart – the floor, the tapestries… Grace and Jackson see it as a new beginning, a future to build together.
He composes, on the guitar. She writes. They love each other passionately, wildly even, without restrictions, making love everywhere, with music playing loudly. For them, life is about to begin.
Intimate Nightmare
Then comes the child, a beloved baby, Harry. Birth of an American family. Despite their aspirations for freedom and apparent disregard for conventions, the couple is caught up in a sad reality: Jackson, overwhelmed by his new father status, is increasingly absent, escaping into work – he finds a job as a farm worker at a nearby farm.
“She dreams of a cat, he gives her a dog. It wasn’t a good idea, we won’t say more.”
Alone, struggling, Grace falls into depression. She loses control, mutilates herself, humiliates herself, rages, strikes, dangerously plays with knives, eyes a rifle… Jackson, disarmed, helplessly watches the disintegration of his partner. She dreams of a cat, he gives her a dog. It wasn’t a good idea, we won’t say more.
In this sixth feature film, adapted from the novel “Die, My Love” by writer Ariana Harwicz, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”) depicts the implosion of a marital edifice. A facade of family happiness turns into an intimate nightmare.
Although she loves her baby intensely, Grace is not a happy mother. Contrary to dominant social discourses, motherhood becomes a prison, an immense impasse, an impossibility to fulfill herself. An intriguing subject, albeit not new. Flaubert, one hundred and seventy years ago, told a similar story. “Madame Bovary, that’s me,” could say Grace/Jennifer Lawrence.
Spectacle of Illness
There was material, romantic, for a great film. Unfortunately, the treatment is unbearable. In the literal sense: perhaps to convey the hell experienced by its characters, the filmmaker inflicts an immense hell on the viewer, multiplying difficult, demonstrative sequences, in a flashy form. Erratic camera, thunderous music, very trendy square format…
We saw this film at Cannes, in May, where it was in competition, a few weeks after reading the sober text by Nicolas Demorand, “Intérieur nuit,” about his bipolarity. The journalist, sticking to a very clinical narrative, lamented the “spectacularization” of mental illness in books or films, regretting that writers or directors, eager to “make a style,” transform an illness into aesthetics. Lynne Ramsay completely falls into this trap. “Die, My Love” is not just painful or unpleasant, it’s an obscene film.
