Film Review: "Love Lies Bleeding" is a Pulpy Feast of Female Gazes and Unruly Bodies
The new film from Rose Glass is a sublime mix of "Bound" and "Thelma & Louise," and the result is an eminently delicious piece of pulp.
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I knew from the minute I saw the trailer for Love Lies Bleeding that I was going to love it. However prissy I might be, I’m a huge fan of seamy genres like noir and pulp, and this film looked like it was going to be full of seaminess. What’s more, I’ve been repeatedly impressed by Kristen Stewart in her post-Twilight era. Like so many of those who were ensnared in an enormous franchise–I’m thinking here of many of the young actors from Harry Potter–she has managed to reinvent herself time and again. As others have noted, she doesn’t necessarily lose herself in any of the roles she’s taken on, but she’s proven remarkably adept at playing characters who are all spiky edges and bruised feelings, hiding a world of hurt and trauma beneath their ever-so-slightly overwrought exteriors.
This is certainly the case with her character in Love Lies Bleeding. When the film begins Stewart’s Lou is working a dead-end job as the manager of a seedy gym which, it turns out, belongs to her father. When drifter/bodybuilder Katie (Katy O’Brian) walks in, there’s an immediate connection between the two, and it’s not long before they’re in bed together. Things go from romantic to entropic once Jackie, in a fit of roid rage and pent-up fury, kills Lou’s abusive brother-in-law. Before long the two are at odds, but they manage to unite against Lou’s sinister father and, in the end, they manage to ride off together.
Love Lies Bleeding is one of those films which somehow manages to take itself both very seriously and yet not seriously at all. There are times when it verges into the surreal and the quasi-ridiculous, only to bring us crashing back down into this real world of grit and bodies and blood and sweat and tendons. I’m not sure that it always sticks the landings when it comes to these abrupt shifts in tone, but that’s the thing about pulp. It doesn’t have to. Part of the pleasure of a film like this one, after all, is in knowing that it doesn’t have to follow the rules of good taste. We go in knowing that it’s going to be visceral and sometimes ugly, and that’s okay.
One of the most refreshing things about this film, to my mind, is its emphasis on a specifically female gaze. From the moment that Jackie walks into her gym, Lou can’t take her eyes off of her, the camera suturing us to her gaze as she watches her strut through the gym, lingering on her as she begins to lift the dumbbells. This is desire made manifest in the body of the film and the body of the spectator, and what is particularly fascinating about this sequence is the extent to which we-as-Lou watch Jackie watch herself as she continues to sculpt her body into the weapon that she wants it to be.
For, as much as the film is concerned with the nature of the gaze, it is also obsessed with flesh and the vulgar, earthy details of life. In the early parts of the film in particular, the camera lingers with almost prurient interest in the quotidian and the gross, whether it’s Lou’s cat eagerly lapping up the discarded remnants of her TV dinner or the egg yolks she throws away so Jackie can have her egg-white omelets. The camera’s most abiding interest, however, is in Jackie’s bodily transformation, particularly once she starts taking steroids. Time and again we watch as her body transforms at a rapid pace, veins leaping to the surface and muscles building and bulging far faster than they ever would in the real world.
There are many moments when Love Lies Bleeding veers almost into body horror territory, particularly during the moments when Jackie’s rage causes her body to almost slip out of her control. This is particularly true during the moment when she competes in a bodybuilding contest, but it’s also what allows her to overcome Lou’s abusive and manipulative father, Lou Sr.. It’s fitting that the lesbian body in all of its excess would be that which brings the patriarchy to its knees. It helps, of course, that Lou manages to reclaim her father’s gun and very nearly shoots him with it, before deciding to leave him to the tender mercy of the feds. Not to get all psychoanalytic, but this sure looks like a pointed reclamation, and disavowal, of the phallus and the mastery it represents.
It might seem a bit cliche to some, but there’s something really satisfying and cathartic about seeing Lou finally get to make a strike back at the patriarchy and live to tell the tale. Throughout the film we’ve seen the extent to which she is surrounded and hemmed in by toxic masculinity, whether that of the roided-out men who frequent the gym or her sinister father, a small-time crime lord who has his hooks into local law enforcement (he even sends one of them after Lou after she threatens to turn him in to the feds). Ed Harris is reptilian and despicable as her father, in that way that only he can be, and it’s truly a pleasure to see him brought low at last.
A lesser and safer film than Love Lies Bleeding would have seen our destructive dyke heroines perishing in one last blaze of glory, but this isn’t that type of movie. Instead, after yet another of those dreamy sequences, we see them riding off into the night. They can’t have it all their own way, of course, and it turns out that Daisy–a drug addict who has had the hots for Lou since the beginning and was trying to blackmail them, only to be shot by Jackie under Lou Sr.’s influence (the plot is surprisingly complicated sometimes)--has somehow managed to survive her wound. As the last thing connecting them to their old life, she has to die, and Lou ruthlessly strangles her, showing that there might be more of her father to her personality than she would like to admit. There’s something bleakly and subversively funny about the film’s final moments, as we watch Lou drag Daisy’s body into a field while Jackie sleeps in the truck. It’s a fitting end to a film that has been as mixed in its town as in its aesthetic appeals.
As such, Lou and Jackie join other deadly lesbians in cinema who not only manage to be gay and do crimes but also get to live and tell the tale. I mean, sure, there’s always the possibility that the cops will hunt them down, or that someone will happen to drive by and the whole escape will fall apart. However, one can hope that Lou and Jackie will get their happy ending. All in all, Love Lies Bleeding is, as a friend of mine put it, like a perfect blend of Bound and Thelma & Louise. It gives us all the delicious pleasures of the queer rebel without the tragic ending. And for that, my dears, I am truly grateful.