Glass, Rose (Film Director)

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    Queer Women Behaving Badly: These Movies Scrap the Coming-Out Story

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    “Love Lies Bleeding,” “Bottoms” and “Drive-Away Dolls” are leading a wave of stories about lesbians living their lives, committing crimes along the way.To a queer woman going to the movies, it may seem as if there has been something in the ether for the past year. First, in August, there was “Bottoms.” Then “Drive-Away Dolls” arrived in February. “Love Lies Bleeding” joined the fray in March. This cluster of relatively mainstream films about queer women, deliciously frothy and fun to watch, feels unprecedented.It isn’t, of course — film always has a precedent. But the latest titles are different. These movies lean into camp: heightened realities, suspended disbelief, larger-than-life plots. What’s more, queer women had a significant hand in crafting each release, and none of the movies involve coming-out stories. Their protagonists are already out, living their lives, committing crimes along the way.“I don’t think that these three films, even taken individually, could have quite existed in the pretty mainstream public sphere even a few years ago,” said Clara Bradbury-Rance, a film scholar and the author of “Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory.” “At what point,” she added, “do you reach a sense that lesbians are represented enough to represent them in their badness and toxicity and irritation?”“Bottoms” follows two lesbian high school seniors, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), who start a fight club (sorry, self-defense club) as a ruse to hook up with cheerleaders. “Drive-Away Dolls” is a crime caper about unsuspecting friends, Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), who find a mysterious package in the trunk of their car during a road trip. And in “Love Lies Bleeding,” Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an ambitious bodybuilder, comes to town and falls for Lou (Kristen Stewart), a gym manager with a shadowy past.With their offbeat B-movie feel, these stories are “managing to mess with this dichotomy between the good representation and the bad representation,” Bradbury-Rance said, allowing us to think, “there are ways of finding pleasure in ambivalence and ambiguity and tension.”These films are part of a recent larger wave of lesbian stories that includes “Tár,” “Nyad,” “The Color Purple” and “Silver Haze,” and they stand in stark contrast to another recent cluster: the period dramas of the late 2010s. Think: “Carol,” “The Favourite,” “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and “Ammonite.” Andrea Torres, one of the programmers behind the recent Sapph-o-Rama series at Film Forum in Manhattan, referred to this as the “lesbian saints era.” It even had its own “Saturday Night Live” sketch: “Lesbian period drama,” went the tagline. “You get one a year — make the most of it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Review: Kristen Stewart, Crazy (and Scary) in Love

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      In this neo-noir, the ever reliable, always watchable actress plays a small-town loner who’s struck by the unexpected arrival of a mysterious drifter.Watching Kristen Stewart is always an adventure. A performer who makes good movies better and dreary movies tolerable, she has a restlessness that has made her one of the more interesting attractions in American film. She has a gift for making a character’s inner life transparently readable, and while she can be subtle and withholding, it is her fascinatingly unquiet presence that draws you in, an itchy intensity that can keep her (and you) on edge. Pauline Kael wrote that Jane Fonda’s “motor runs a little fast” — so does Stewart’s.In her latest vehicle, “Love Lies Bleeding,” a neo-noir in a violent and winkingly nasty key, Stewart plays Lou, short for Louise, a small-town loner somewhere in New Mexico, yearning to escape a classic dead end. If this were a 1940s noir, Lou would be fixing jalopies in a dingy garage while waiting for a dame to stroll in to change his fate. That’s more or less what happens here, except that it’s the ’80s, and Lou is a woman who works in a gym where she’s wasting away, unclogging toilets and slipping steroids to bulked-up juicers. Then, a beautiful stranger walks into the gym and changes her life, as sirens sometimes do in movies.The stranger, Jackie (a good, physically imposing Katy O. Brian), immediately catches Lou’s eye. It’s destiny, Old Hollywood style, and it lights the movie up and sets it on its incendiary way. What happens is hot, yummy stuff, but romances like these need something to get in their way, whether it’s a bag of loot, a jealous ex or just a contrivance. This movie obliges with violence, lots of guns, spooky flashbacks and a classic villain, played by a fantastic Ed Harris with a sneer and an epically terrible wig. There’s a lot of extravagantly and comically bad hair in “Love Lies Bleeding,” along with equally rotten teeth and souls.It’s a good guess that the director Rose Glass (“Saint Maud”) has read James M. Cain or seen some of the films made from his hard-boiled books; she may have thumbed through a few Jim Thompson novels, too. (Glass wrote the script with Weronika Tofilska.) “Love Lies Bleeding” isn’t on par with Cain or Thompson, and overselling a comparison would be silly. Even so, when Jackie first walks into the gym, the world-altering effect she has on Lou recalls the moment when the drifter in “The Postman Always Rings Twice” meets his kismet: “Then I saw her,” he says, “her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.”Lou and Jackie’s don’t connect until after the gym closes and the darkness is wrapping them in its embrace. Outside, they meet and greet, sizing each other up with hungry eyes and faint smiles. First, though, they need to deal with some narrative interruptus. One of the gym rats hits on Jackie after the gym closes, but when he grabs at her, she punches him, hard. He hits her right back in an exchange that, among other things, announces the movie’s bad-ass attitude as well as Jackie’s fearlessness, her recklessness and rage. It also effectively serves as violent foreplay to Lou and Jackie’s progressively unhinged and dangerous romance.They fall into bed quickly, and the story soon heats up, too. A bodybuilder en route to a contest in Vegas, Jackie has drifted into town, as mysterious types tend to do, where she soon lands a job to earn some cash. She crashes with Lou, who — after a steamy night and a cozy morning-after breakfast — is understandably eager for Jackie to stick around. Yet Lou also remains super-jumpy and wary, like someone permanently looking over her shoulder, and Stewart gives the character a tremulous energy that vibrates in her every look, gesture and head bob. At times, you can almost see the anxiety spreading under her skin like an electric current.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Saint Maud’ Review: A Passion for Sinners

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘Saint Maud’ Review: A Passion for SinnersA disturbed young nurse becomes obsessed with a dying artist in this exceptional horror movie debut from the director Rose Glass.Morfydd Clark, mesmerizing as the title character in “Saint Maud.”Credit…Angus Young/A24Jan. 28, 2021, 1:37 p.m. ETSaint MaudNYT Critic’s PickDirected by Rose GlassDrama, Horror, MysteryR1h 24mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Folding sexual arousal and religious ecstasy into a single, gasping sensation, “Saint Maud,” the feature debut of the director Rose Glass, burrows into the mind of a lonely young woman and finds psycho-horror gold.Maud (a mesmerizing Morfydd Clark) is a live-in palliative care nurse in an unnamed British seaside town. A recent religious convert — we don’t know why, but the film’s unnervingly gory opening more than hints at a profound trauma — Maud believes that God has chosen her to guide the fallen to salvation. This mission leads her to the forbidding hilltop mansion of Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a celebrated dancer and choreographer now stricken by late-stage lymphoma.The ensuing interplay between caregiver and patient, faith and denial, asceticism and intemperance, veers from chilling to morbidly comic. Determined to enjoy her final few weeks, Amanda submits to Maud’s prayers while remaining an enthusiastic hedonist. Smoking and drinking with relish, hosting gatherings of her bohemian friends and romancing a younger lover (Lily Frazer), Amanda nevertheless finds comfort in the intimacy of Maud’s quiet ministrations. Still, Maud is a mystery (for one thing, as we learn late in the film, her name isn’t really Maud), but whether she is a batty Bible-thumper or something infinitely more sinister, we have barely 84 minutes to find out.Using every one of them, Glass leans heavily on a hermetic atmosphere humming with zealotry and barely suppressed lust. Drifting into trances and bedeviled by fiery stomach pains, Maud nurtures a piety that seems never less than a burden. In one unsettling sequence, she wanders past the town’s rundown arcades and into a bar, her desperation for company overwhelming her disgust at her own needs. But there’s a price, as the raised red welts on her pale body bear out: Passion for anyone but Christ must be punished.“May God bless you and never waste your pain,” she tells a beggar, perhaps indicating concern that her own agonies are being squandered. And while the film’s graceful special effects leave space for more than one reading of Maud’s actions — an ambivalence that’s most pronounced in the gorgeous, hallucinatory finale — it’s clear she’s on a fixed trajectory, one that promises a Grand Guignol climax to her seeming delusions.Formally controlled and visually elegant, “Saint Maud” has a dark, spoiled beauty and a shifting point of view that questions Maud’s distorted vision. Favoring suggestion over specifics, the script (also by Glass) doesn’t always avoid the familiar potholes of the genre: the nosebleeds and Gothic interiors, the baleful lighting and self-harming behavior. Gestures toward Maud’s troubled past remain vague, but the movie’s artistry and sensuality suck you in. Maud knows she can’t save Amanda’s body; what she wants is her soul.Saint MaudRated R for lethal scissors and loony spirituality. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More