Luis Martínez Berlin
Berlin
Updated Sunday, February 18, 2024-7:10 p.m.
The phrase that the only thing you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun can be interpreted without much effort as what it probably always was: an ingenious sexist kick. Or even great, but sexist at the end. It is difficult to recognize it because, let's admit it, it is not so long ago that we realized how stale many sentences we thought were irrefutable. And so on until a director like
Rose Glass
, supported by two actresses like
Kristen Stewart
and
Katy O'Brian
(without forgetting
Ed Harris
in one of his most delirious and perfect performances) appear to find the unexpected polysemy of the most famous aphorism and with less grace from Godard.
Indeed,
Love lies bleeding
(something like
Love lies bleeding
) agrees with the Swiss filmmaker, but from the other side. It's not that a girl and a gun are enough to make a movie but, suddenly, if there are no girls and guns, who cares about cinema. It sounds radical and, in fact, that's what it's about.
The second work of the director who debuted with the miracle of horror and faith that was
Saint Maud
now offers an exercise in excess, ingenuity and visual imagination as disconcerting as it is hypnotic. Maybe mesmeric (whatever this means).
The story is told of a bodybuilder (O'Brian) heading to a championship in Las Vegas
. Along the way, she will find her bones in a lost town. There she will meet Stewart's character, who runs a gym and sweats her, and the latter's father who, in addition to collecting beetles, is the boss of the local mafia and owner of a shooting range. This is Harris bald and with long hair. Both. What follows does not allow narration for the same reason that no one is capable of recounting an electric shock in real time.
If in his previous film Glass made the story of a pious nurse willing to do everything to save her patient's sick soul become an overwhelming and tremendous baroque tale beyond reason, now it's more of the same. But in another landscape.
The director mixes, muddies, manipulates and polishes (all at the same time) each of the commonplaces of the most brutal cinema that the B series has ever been capable of
. And she does it, the way Godard himself liked her, as perfectly aware of the myth she inhabits as she is willing to change everything. The Coens have probably found, without searching, the sister they perhaps didn't even need.
Love lies bleeding
is allowed almost everything. The only condition that it imposes on itself is that, at some point, it explodes and oozes some liquid: mainly blood, although
it does not dislike semen, vaginal fluids, vomit or fire itself
. The screen expands until reality coincides with the dream, the hallucination with the detailed description of a void that covers everything. At one point, O'Brian becomes a giant. Literally. And that's when his enthusiasm spreads. That Kristen Stewart lends her name and her vocation to a film of these characteristics only speaks well of her and her characteristics. The one who took her first steps in cinema with the
Twilight
saga is on her way to becoming the most brilliant, risk-loving, provocative and clever actress of her generation.
Definitely, now yes, it took Glass and Stewart to arrive to explain to us what that thing was about the guns and Godard's girls. And it wasn't what we were thinking.
The delicacy of Mati Diop and the madness of Bruno Dumont
For the rest, in the official section the documentary, beautiful in its simplicity, by
Mati Diop
entitled
Dahomey
stood out . And he did it alongside
L'empire , the most deranged and hilarious of
Bruno Dumont
's films
, and
Sterben
(Die in German), the monolithic, dense and fun (yes, just like that, fun) work by
Matthias Glasner
from three hours long that, as the title announces, leaves no prisoners or injuries.
Dahomey
tells the story of the return of the 26 objects of the kingdom that gives the film its title from Paris to Benin, from the colonizing country to the colony that is no longer a colony. The director of
Atlantics
opts for a transparent grammar arranged in a straight line. And it is there, in its horizontal clarity, where she discovers a universe of dignity whose main argument and meaning is the materiality of pieces of art as fragile as they are loaded with meaning, as supposedly rough as they are profound.
The decolonization that is talked about so much is this
. The camera follows the packaging process with the same precision and detail with which it captures the conversation of a group of students. And she is always attentive not so much to things, treasures or political speeches as to the slight and deep vibration of a gesture of cinema, of a gesture of virtue. Unappealable.
Dumont's thing is something else for the simple reason that it doesn't look anything alike. The French director plays what entertains him most, irony, and if in the past he was able to make a musical about Joan of Arc with a heavy metal band, now he reinterprets Star
Wars
itself (or something similar) with Flying Gothic cathedrals and interstellar kingdoms in the middle of the French countryside. He sounds crazy and he is. And hilarious (which is fun, but a lot). It is true that the joke does not last as long as the movie, but he is forgiven because something so crazy always deserves to be forgiven.
And finally,
Sterben
(Die). If the title seems pretentious, the film itself clears up doubts. Glasner is not a director who titles his films in any way (
Free Will, This is Love
or
Merced
' are not exactly proof of modesty) and it is appreciated that he attacks the themes from above among so much minimalist or just minimal cinema.
Structured by chapters, the film reviews one by one the stories of the four members of a family
and their relationship with, in fact, disaster in general and death in particular.
Sterben
always looks for shamelessly funny (or just ridiculous) vanishing points between the desolation of what is narrated and in those moments of comedy, always long, one grows. The conversation in which the mother confesses to her son (Lars Eidinger) that she never loved him is simply brilliant because of its absurdity in all its sad frankness. But three hours goes a long way and the abuse of derivative arguments weighs down much of the disproportionateness of the effort. Be that as it may, if you have to die, you die. Even without the old guns.