Cinema: Die, My Love, the characters in hell, the spectators too.

At the beginning, it’s crazy love. Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), young New Yorkers, enthusiastically move into an old dilapidated mansion in Montana, inherited from a distant relative. A large empty, ghostly house where everything is falling apart – the floor, the tapestries… Grace and Jackson see it as a starting point, a future to build together.

He composes music on the guitar…

At first, it’s crazy love. Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), young New Yorkers, enthusiastically move into an old dilapidated mansion in Montana, inherited from a distant relative. A large empty, ghostly house where everything is falling apart – the floor, the tapestries… Grace and Jackson see it as a starting point, a future to build together.

He composes music on the guitar. She writes. They love each other passionately, even savagely, without restraint, making love everywhere, with music in the background. For them, life is about to begin.

Intimate Nightmare

Then comes the child, a beloved baby, Harry. The birth of an American family. Despite their aspirations for freedom and apparent disdain for conventions, the couple finds themselves trapped in a sad banality: Jackson, overwhelmed by his new father status, becomes more and more absent, escaping into work – finding a job as a farm laborer in 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 sinks into depression. She loses control, mutilates herself, humiliates herself, roars, strikes, dangerously plays with knives, eyes a rifle… Jackson, disarmed, helplessly witnesses 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 the writer Ariana Harwicz, Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”) depicts the implosion of a marital structure. A facade of family happiness turns into an intimate nightmare.

While she loves her baby madly, Grace is not a happy mother. Contrary to socially dominant discourses, motherhood becomes a prison, a dead end, an impossibility to fulfill for her. An interesting subject, though not new. Flaubert, one hundred and seventy years ago, told no different. “Madame Bovary, that’s me,” could say Grace/Jennifer Lawrence.

Spectacle-Illness

There was potential, romanticism, 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 a huge hell on the viewer, multiplying challenging, demonstrative sequences in a glaring form. Erratic camera, thundering music, very trendy square format…

We saw this film at Cannes in May, where it was in competition, a few weeks after reading Nicolas Demorand’s sober text, “Interior Night,” about his bipolar disorder. The journalist, sticking to a very clinical narrative, lamented the “spectacularization” of mental illness in books or cinema, regretting that writers or directors, eager to “make a statement,” turn an illness into an aesthetic. Lynne Ramsay falls entirely into this pitfall. “Die, My Love” is not just painful or unpleasant, it is an obscene film.