She actively looks for feature films with a 'queer perspective', says actress Kristen Stewart (34) in the Adlon Kempinski hotel, Berlin. Not so much 'queer stories': transgender encounters misunderstanding or lesbian comes out of the closet – they have pretty much been told now, she thinks. Rather 'normal' films with queer protagonists. Although she doesn't expect too much from it. “Speaking of the mainstream: there is little gain to be made from marginalized voices. People don't really care about that. And film is an industry. As long as such a queer perspective has not been proven safe or successful, everyone looks at each other. Who goes first?”
Love Lies Bleeding then makes a valiant attempt: a delightfully pulpy, slowly derailing lesbian neo-noir. Set in New Mexico, 1989, the film follows a well-known American plot: a stranger passing through a hamlet encounters a local beauty with dangerous luggage. That village femme fatale is Kristen Stewart as introverted, irritable gym owner Lou. She falls for female bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O' Brian), who has a temporary job at her father's shooting range on the way to a competition in Las Vegas. Their steroid-fuelled amour fou unleashes a spiral of violence in what appears to be a deeply criminal village. A film in the raunchy, dirty style of the early nineties, full of grotesque twists.
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Love Lies Bleeding is a dirty but wonderful queer film by mega talent Rose Glass (●●●●●)
Stewart's image
In Berlin, a journalist compares Lou to the good Bella Swan from the romantic vampire film Twilight that once made Kristen Stewart famous. Does she break with her former image? Stewart looks deathly tired, a look in which she excels anyway. What 34-year-old is going against who she was as an 18-year-old? Over the past sixteen years, Stewart has proven herself as a Hollywood celebrity and in countless art films and has grown into a queer icon. “I don't really know what my image was, I'm too close to the edge of the forest for that,” she says diplomatically. “But I don't rebel against myself, I just get older and make different choices.”
British director Rose Glass (33) looks surprised when we ask her why she cast Kristen Stewart. “What? Because she's super cool, of course. She is perfect for a brooding noir anti-heroine.”
Glass appeared in her debut Saint Maud – a film that attracted much less attention than it deserved due to the Covid pandemic – already a great talent with a unique voice. She confirms that Love Lies Bleeding, set in 1989; the Berlin Wall falls on television. Glass: “I don't want to go into too much detail about it, it would be pretentious, but it suits Jackie. As a bodybuilder, she embodies the eighties, when old-fashioned individualism and the American Dream revived under Ronald Reagan.”
Jackie is the line to Saint Maud, a claustrophobic film about a deeply religious nurse who torments himself to feel chosen by God. Glass: “I thought: after all these years with Maud in her stuffy basement, I am now going to do something completely different. But a female bodybuilder who pushes her body to extremes out of an obsessive fixation to become an untouchable statue… The connection with Maud is now clear to me.”
Rose Glass consciously places the eighties character Jackie in a nineties context, a more cynical, nihilistic era. Movies that Love Like Bleeding has in his DNA, she consciously decided not to revisit it: none Natural Born Killers, Thelma & Louis or Wild at Heart for her, and certainly not an early Tarantino. “I was afraid that the film would otherwise become pastiche.”
Glass is still somewhere halfway between fangirl and superstar. At a screening in Berlin's Verti Music Hall, I see her standing still like a bunny in the headlights in front of 2,200 viewers. “Wow. I don't know what to say at the moment.” Kristen Stewart skips to the rescue and captivates the audience. Berlin is extremely cool. Rose is extremely cool. “The way she puts America in its place, with its addiction to self-assertion and that strange idea that you can be anything you want to be.”
A day later, in the Adlon Kempinski hotel, Stewart says he is “extremely proud” of Rose. “She is inherently shy. She doesn't shout on set, she whispers. But what she says is so down-to-earth, touché, precise, confident and actionable that everyone automatically leans towards her. That is very nice to see.”
Stewart intuitively chose Love Lies Bleeding. “I sail blindly on my whims and my curiosity. And I don't mind if it's a pothole in the road, a bad movie can actually be a nice memory. But if, like here, you see the film a year after shooting and think: 'Wow, that turned out well!', then that is a icing on the cake.”
Labrador plays cat
Stewart liked playing the weak part in the power dynamic with a very strong woman. “Lou is frozen and closed due to latent, unresolved trauma. She tells herself that she is staying in the village to protect her sister, but she is paralyzed by isolation and loneliness. And then that impressive, brave, almost extraterrestrially strong body walks into her gym. Jackie makes herself as wide as possible while Lou makes herself as small as possible.
“It's not just sex, Lou gets the idea through falling in love that she can be a good person and change her life. But love also drives her to destructive and horrible behavior, because we are small, selfish pleasure seekers. I'm glad I don't represent a superficial, ridiculous moral notion that I have to praise in interviews afterwards. Lou does disgusting things for love and realizes she can't escape herself.”
To play that character, Stewart isolated himself on set. “Lou is insular, I am not. Lou is a cat, I'm a Labrador. Her past weighs on her, so I always had a tennis ball in my pocket. Between takes I would bounce it off a wall, like Jack Nicholson The Shining.”
It took her a long time to realize that Love Lies Bleeding is also a satire. “I took the script very seriously, really. But then I saw Rose giggling after a scene I played very seriously. And that she pushed me to go further, to act not so subtly. It wasn't until halfway through that I realized how camp and extreme this is. Rose likes to use the word bombastic. Perfect. This movie is funny, but like giggling at a funeral.”
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