Love Lies Bleeding.
I’m trying to start going to the movies more often because I want to make more room for “cozy activities,” to counterbalance my impulse to work nonstop. I think I have this urgency to get things done, like in my head, I’m always about to run out of time, and so I forget, sometimes, the importance of being relaxed, of doing things just for the fun of them.
There’s this indie movie theatre I like in Atlanta that is very old school and quirky, and they have these movie posters on the walls in the lobby from probably twenty, thirty years ago—all of them inexplicably in French. Apparently, there was someone who used to come up and greet everyone in a host of different languages before the movie started, and when I went with my friends this week, there was a video before the film where someone praised Love Lies Bleeding and gave some film history on great second films (Jaws, The Sixth Sense) before saying that this director’s second film (which we were about to see) might be among those greats.
I wanted to see Love Lies Bleeding because it’s queer and the magazine Them was excited about it, and—despite my never really having thought about body building before and my hesitance to see movies that seem violent—these two reasons were enough for me to put it on my list. Some of my friends wanted to see it too so we went to watch it together, none of us quite sure what it was going to be like.
I’d heard that maybe it was gory and maybe it was scary, so I figured I’d have to close my eyes most of the time. I was pleasantly surprised then at how quirky and weird and calm the opening of it was. It’s set in the ‘80s in a town in the middle of nowhere, and the music in it was epic and odd and made the whole thing feel atmospheric in a way that was hard to look away from. As one of my friends noted afterward, it felt a little like Pulp Fiction but queer, and while maybe it’s not as put together of a film as Pulp Fiction, its messiness and its campiness made it feel even more endearing. Kristen Stewart falls in love with a massive beautiful bisexual who—before anything pops off—is already giving off slightly unhinged vibes. They fall for each other anyway and move quickly into a relationship—spending so much time together—without really learning maybe what they should about each other before deciding that this is it. At least for now, this is it, but then things get complicated, and the easygoing nature of the beginning of the film is replaced by a hectic chaos that literally had me and my friends leaning forward, hands over our mouths, unable to stop watching. Plot can do a lot for a movie, as can actors who lean in. The whole thing doesn’t have to be pristine as long everybody’s into it, and this felt like a movie that everybody involved was into.
Love Lies Bleeding is weird and it’s chaotic and it has touches of the surreal, especially as it continues to unfold. It was this surrealness that made me love it enormously. I love a movie that is tapped into the real world but also—when it feels like—leaves the real world on the floor. We can both be here and be beyond here, movies like this seem to say. We can create our own real, a real that is more protective, more gorgeous than what we’ve been given. I love Love Lies Bleeding for its ability to do this, for its ability to be messy and strange and funny, and a little gross but not quite scary or gory enough to leave you feeling hollowed out when it’s over. I didn’t need to take a nap after this or burn some sage (I wish I was the kind of person who could burn sage). I didn’t feel empty or heavy—I called my boyfriend and tried very carefully to tell him about the movie without giving it all away. I tried to communicate how it made me feel—excited, like queer people could do anything, like there is room, in art, to make the world a bigger, more loving place.
While Love Lies Bleeding is perhaps not going to get the acclaim of more prestigious films—maybe it’s not a Spielberg or a whoever made The Sixth Sense—I do think it is in its way very good. It’s a movie that is having a good time and—by having a good time itself—makes you remember how to have a good time too. It made me remember why it’s important to take breaks from work, to encounter art, especially gay art, in the world. It made me want to toast to more “cozy (this movie was not cozy but it was very fun) activities” and to more slowing down and to realizing, maybe, that though time does move quickly and it’s good to be intentional about it, it is also perhaps lovely to sit in an old quirky theatre for two hours and wonder how these people—made up as they may be—are going to get out of this one.
Image: A24
