‘Die My Love’: Lynne Ramsay Boasts About Motherhood With Jennifer Lawrence | Cinema: previews and reviews

In one of those shots that were once beautiful – when the first of the filmmakers composed it or, at most, the first and the second – and which now could not be more staid, burdensome and derivative, a woman walks through a field and caresses with her hand the ears of wheat, or the flowers, or the tall grass, in a shot that cuts between the upper and lower parts of her body and in which the sunlight shines.

With Gladiator The image became famous, but it was a safe bet that Terrence Malick had already filmed it days of paradise, and I’d roll it again until I passed out The tree of life. In the of Die my love, However, there is a juicy novelty: the character carries a huge knife between his fingers. The melancholic and transcendent symbolism is thus transformed into a violent, strange, almost crazy dimension. Lynne Ramsay, its controversial director, has never been one to fondle anything, least of all viewers. The plan is a statement of intent of your style. Not a concession. Knife between teeth to reflect a volcanic existence: that of a young mother who sinks into madness precisely because she is.

Ramsay makes films in spurts. It never flows. His fragmented way of storytelling usually suits films that do not allow the logic of their creatures’ behavior. The goal is to create disorder and, immediately, explosions of joy. Almost to the point of confusing each other. The theme of Die my love, To be honest and direct, it’s postpartum depression, but Ramsay isn’t interested in psychology or society. Not even his character, who he mistreats from start to finish. He is only influenced by his own arrogance in creating shocking images. It reaches them, but at the cost of what? The raw ones rat catcher (1999) e Morvern Callar (2002) put this 55-year-old Scot on the cinematic map when she was in her early thirties. Social cinema? Much more: knife strikes of cruelty with enormous visual power. Naturally with dangerously gratuitous notes, then endorsed We need to talk about Kevin (2011), a magnificent compendium of the immense possibilities of staging and editing, of image, sound and music, but also a nonsense about evil and motherhood, with a fairground psychologism that has reached despicable levels in the mistreatment of its creatures.

Much of the latter, but also of the former, is present Die my love, starring a spectacular Jennifer Lawrence, in a role of enormous physicality and without much dialogue, which the American actress embellishes alongside an equally wonderful Robert Pattinson. Now, this time there is something else to get angry with (yes, Ramsay’s cinema can get angry, and for this you also have to have talent): the film, based on Kill yourself, love, A 2012 novel by the Argentinian Ariana Harwicz, it looks so much at another great work that, in comparison, leaves little or nothing behind that of the Scotswoman.

If anyone hasn’t seen A woman under the influence (1974), by John Cassavetes, could say a thousand things about it Die my love, but it will only be nonsense. Ramsay may think he is honoring her, but in reality he is preying on her (he even copies the meal sequence after her stay “in the asylum”). And their work is much more extravagant, deceptive and futile. He never has the dramatic density of Cassavetes.

What there is is an empty aestheticism and a charged viscerality. Images, sounds and music which, separated from the whole, have, of course, a certain (or immense) lyricism, thanks to a great selection of songs that always sound from within the story, its inventive direction and the prodigious work of Seamus McGarvey, its director of photography. But talking about motherhood, its fears and its difficulties with this succession of inattention, explicitness, dancing, hugs, continuous dog barking, fornication and screaming, is simply boasting about art and the human being.