When it comes to the subjects of her movies, Lynne Ramsey does not take any half measures. Whether it is the frankness of a parent alienated from her psychopathic child in We Need to Talk About Kevin or the unrelenting viciousness of a hitman systematically killing the architects of a sex trafficking ring in You Were Never Really Here, her approach is never subtle or expected. And that is especially true of her latest film, Die My Love, which tackles a subject very rarely discussed on film -postpartum depression- and accentuates it to the most visceral extremes. Profoundly bizarre and disorienting, and very much because of this profoundly effective.
Jennifer Lawrence stars as Grace, who moves with her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) from New York City to a small house in the woods in his home of rural Montana. In a frenetic montage that is probably the best opening sequence of the year we get a sense of their joy-filled early days in this place filled with sex, flirting, and spontaneous exploration. Then Grace becomes pregnant, and then she has a baby -in the wake of which she begins a very stark emotional and psychological decline, not helped by the inconsistent behaviour of Jackson and the isolation of their tiny worn-down house, manifesting in a variety of eccentric, sometimes violent ways.
Presented in only a semi-coherent chronology, the film is uncompromising in its refusal to easily explain any of Grace’s manic actions -her frequent crawling on the ground and behaving like an animal (including the occasional barking match with the insufferable dog Jackson adopts without consulting her), her pathological horniness, tendencies to casually break something in the house or cause a mess, and just general dramatic mood swings when with company -after making a series of passive-aggressive comments to a polite friend at a party she spontaneously strips to her underwear and jumps into the pool. And these are ultimately on the tamer end of the things she does. Ramsay is uninterested in diagnosing Grace -a psychologist attempting to do so late in the film comes to fruitless ends. All of it is merely instinctual, the most extreme expression of what Grace is going through and her situation; on top of the general postpartum effects having to spend her days with the baby alone, bored, sexually frustrated, and emotionally unfulfilled.
And Lawrence’s raw performance sells it spectacularly, an echo (likely a conscious though noble one) of another great performance of directionless feminine depression: Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. Lawrence goes slightly more off-the-wall and her context is stylistically less grounded, but the emotional authenticity is the same. A blistering cry of unfiltered but deeply felt anguish. Certainly it is the most intense and versatile Lawrence has ever been on film, and sees her in contexts that range from the demented to the absurd. And indeed though the movie is hypnotizing and dramatic, it is coloured by a lot of deranged humour -Lawrence taking it on like a champ with a much more outrageous turn here than in No Hard Feelings, the comedy entirely marketed on Lawrence being funny. Pattinson’s got his ridiculous moments too, that he can more than carry -indeed on a few occasions the two are pitted against each other in the broadness of their behaviour. But Lawrence always comes out on top, in both her wildness and her abject antipathy.
Ramsay renders the film in such a subjective daze that it creates a blurred sense of reality. Grace's subjectivity occupies a space somewhere between the metaphorical and the literal -the broad strokes of everything we see are accurate, the more surreal and dreamlike specifics perhaps less so -though they are vivid to Grace's senses. These and that somewhat uncertain timeline gives the movie its hypnotizing air -though the film is more straightforward in presentation than it appears. Punctuating the movie at notable intervals are allusions to Jackson's late father Harry (Nick Nolte), whom Grace had a particular kinship with -and subsequent to that parallels between Grace and her mother-in-law Pam (Sissy Spacek) who also is left alone at home, implicitly going through a crisis of her own. There’s an affair that takes place between Grace and a nameless biker (LaKeith Stanfield) who sometimes comes by the house, in response to suspected affairs of Jackson and his complete disinterest in sexually satisfying Grace. And then there is the intoxicating miasma of a wedding sequence -centrepiece of the film's unhinged mood- in which pain, bitterness, and desperation invades a happy occasion, all efforts to quell the emotional bleed conveying only a deep, pitiable sadness.
It is a sad movie, in among the madness. Grace's inane and violent outbursts, even her sexual preoccupations and even her apathy are rooted in an overwhelming sense of emptiness her circumstances and relationships in no way mitigate. It should be noted it is only her relationship to her child that borders on healthy -she confesses to a therapist he is the only thing in her world she feels any attachment to. That might run contrary to some of her actions, how constantly distracted from the child she is, but it makes it no less true. Maternal affection manifests in a variety of ways and for Grace appears to be something separate from herself -the one thing truly capable of grounding her. It is a highly interesting complex, like something I feel I've never seen in a movie.
There is an ample degree of that to be fair, and not just in the actions themselves, but in Ramsay's sharp and considered way of presenting them: a first-person perspective of Grace crawling through tall grass, the chaotic but articulate editing as she trashes the bathroom -violently running her nails down the wall as though a captive trying to escape- yet also some sustained takes that frame her isolation in relation to an empty world (shot near Calgary, the prairies have never looked so barren and unattractive). And of course various comic ironies of juxtaposition best exemplified by a rash of strange but perfectly fitting musical needle-drops, such as an offbeat "Love Twist Again" through that opening montage, "Hey Mickey" over one of her early episodes at home, and "Little April Showers" (a song from Bambi) played in full as Grace wanders the woods, her search for serenity countered by the aggression of nature. It's an eclectic soundtrack, where Elvis and Peggy Lipton mix with Bowie and Joy Division (and also Raffi), but it is a very good one.
The particular depth of metaphor here may be lost on me, as someone who has of course never been through postpartum depression. Both Ramsay and Lawrence have experienced childbirth -and appear to be more intimately familiar with what these extremes they are depicting in its aftermath really represent. Yet the cry in the dark underpinning them resonates and the movie's ultimate meaning is broadly not hard to pin down. There may not be an iota of grace in the performance, but Lawrence carries Die My Love like nothing else she has made, effortlessly bringing the audience into her pain and anger. Unrelenting and unapologetic, it is a work of radical expression from Ramsay, as fascinating as it is engrossing.
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