Saw it the plane. I went in completely cold and wasn’t familiar with Ramsay’s work. Afterwards, I spent way too long trying to figure out what the film was about.
In a fireside chat at Cannes, Ramsay says,
“This whole postartum thing is just bullshit. It’s not about that. It’s about a relationship breaking down, it’s about love breaking down, and sex breaking down after having a baby. And it’s also about a creative block.”
Then of course critics went and wrote the postpartum piece anyway. haha.
The thing is I don’t think they’re wrong, exactly.
The awareness agenda is partly how a film like this gets made and ultimately seen. A demand for a strong female performance channeled through a universal but under-discussed topic is how you get someone of Jennifer Larwrence’s caliber attached. Pattinson is cough how you get all those thirsty romance litfic fans through the door.
The problem is the headiness of the postpartum subject combined with structural decisions made Ramsay’s stated intentions difficult to convey to audiences through the film.
Ebert said film is an empathy machine. You go in, get swept up, then leave having experienced being someone else for a few liminal silver minutes.
The film’s stated target is Lawrence’s character, Grace. You’re supposed to understand postpartum from the inside. But Ramsay shoots Lawrence entirely from the outside. In one scene, Pattinson’s character, Jackson, pulls Grace into the car to have a real talk. To hash it out as it were. Here you can see Ramsay’s hand. The camera switches to the passenger side with dramatic high-contrast. Grace is turned away towards the camera, eyes bulged, face an inscrutable mask of ah something. We’re not sure. She looks like a kidnapping victim and Jackson is her capture. In anothe scene, Grace is on all fours, prowling through tall Montana grass. In another, she’s alone in a hotel suite in her wedding dress, complaining to the receptionist about ice. A hallucinated guitarist strums leisurely on the bed. Then she bloodies her forehead on the dressing table mirror.
The exterior shooting direction here makes Grace’s interiority opaque. Other times, it does work. In car scenes, the interior camera puts either Lawrence or Pattinson in focus, visually conveying the relational distance between their two respective characters. When the camera is outside pointing into the car, the car is haloed by soft light, you can almost imagine what it must’ve been like on long leisurely romantic drives, before the baby, in the before times.
In the evenings, there is, inexplicably, never any artificial lighting within the house. Ramsay intended this to make the house feel cold and unlivable.
Interesting enough, the dark evenings are also where Grace seem the most aware and sane. Grace frequently wakes up in the middle of the night to find Jackson asleep. In the evenings, Jackson is always never around. I’m not going to shoot my own dog, he proclaims, before proceeding to go back to sleep, leaving a barking dog to die slowly in pain. In another scene, Grace complains that the last time they had sex, Jackson was asleep.
One evening, Grace accidentally spills breast milk blotting out pen ink. She proceeds to mix the two on paper. In another, she finds Jackson’s father walking out to the woods. She dances with him in a diaphanous nightgown under the moonlight. She walks into a shed and tells Helmet, played by Stanfield, to cut his lip. He does.
In the evenings, the house is dark and unalive, with no one figuratively around. In the evenings, outside the house, are chance encounters and magical realism.
The cinematographer, McGarvey expounds, “One of my suggestions initially was, ‘Let’s shoot on Ektachrome,’” “We didn’t want it to feel like a realist film, and Grace, the character played by Jennifer Lawrence, we wanted it to feel like it was somehow an embodiment of her perspective. A skewed perspective of the truth. And Ektachrome allowed for that because it really has a unique photographic signature.”
“All the night exteriors we shot by day, and it gave a sense of surreality to the night work because it doesn’t look real,” McGarvey explains. “There’s an absolutely avowed sense of artifice.
The day/night contrast is an intended component of the film’s visual language and functions as a domain expansion of Grace’s mental state. During the day, Grace can barely hold it together. At night, she gets a reprieve to be herself, again.
In the penultimate scene, as darkness falls, Grace says “Enough.” She can’t bear to see another day.
McGarvey shot on Ektachrome to embody Grace’s skewed perspective. But without an outside reference point, it’s hard to tease interiority out of distortion.
Ramsay says of the film, “It’s my kind of comedy and love story, so it’s going to be dark and fucked-up.”
The use of humor by and on the characters is a port into their interiority. Jackson’s humor is used to manage the room, defuse tension, and hopefully restore normalcy. His jokes are of someone who believes things can be okay again. The obliviousness is the humor.
Grace, locked herself in the bathroom, literally scratching at the wallpaper,
“I don’t want to shit in the bush, I want to shit in the toilet” “Come on, it’s coming out” “Come on, it’s going to be all over the floor” “I’m starting to smell it”
The seriousness of the situation only hits when he finally enters the bathroom.
Grace opens the glovebox and finds a pack of cigarettes containing condoms,
“Grace I know what you’re thinking. That’s just an old pack. You’ve seen them before” “They’re Greg’s” “You and Greg are very very close”
Grace proceeds to blow the condoms like a balloon.
Grace is bathos. She’s the only one in on the joke. She’s not managing the room.
At the kitchen table with Jackson’s bereaved mother,
“He shot himself, uncle Frank” “Yes” “And you found him?” “I did” “That must’ve been awful” “It was” “In the head?” “In the head!?” “No” “Where then?” “Heart? Chest?” “No” “Leg? Feet? Back? Arm? Stomache? Dick?” “Ass?” “Oh my god he shot himself in his own ass intentionally!?” “You know he looks just like you” “Uncle Frank?” “No, the baby you goose”
At a houseparty,
“I think I nearly lost my mind, for the first six months” “When do you think you’ll be getting it back?”
Sometimes the joke is applied to the participants but addressed to the audience. After Grace jumps into a swimming pool at a houseparty, Jackson has a panic attack and Grace ends up being the one to comfort him,
“What your chest hurts?” “Breath with me” “Yeah, see?” “You’re okay, you’re okay” “He’s okay”
Hilarious.
Helmet, is a walking joke. Grace tells him to cut his lip and he does. Later you see helmet’s lip visibly tremble when Grace accosts him and his family in a parking lot.
It’s tragic-comedy: Jackson is oblivious, Grace is aware but unable to stop, and Helmet is just hopeless.
Comedy can expose interiority. You laugh because you understood. There wasn’t enough here for the empathy machinery to grip onto.
The movie makes another concession to Grace’s interiority.
There’s a scene towards the end where Grace is coming home from the insanity ward. Outwardly she’s totally fine now, really, but inwardly, we see a series of flashing short segments including from the previous minutes of movie runtime, and ends with an original scene taking place presumably while Grace was in the ward, as she imagines speaking to Jackson’s late father.
“When I came in you were saying” “What are you sorry about?” “I don’t remember” “Do you think you need to apologize for anything?” “No” “Do I have to get up?” “No, Grace, you don’t need to do anything” “I can just stay in bed?” “If that’s what you want” “Oh, it’s you. How are you?” “Everyone misses you”
The success of Ramsay’s previous films is existence proof for the counterargument that exterior shooting can work. It just doesn’t work here.
The film Ramsay actually made structurally is Jackson’s film: How does it feel to love someone unreachable.
The irony is the empathy machine is actually running on Jackson, not Grace.
The audience share Jackson’s epistemological position the entire film. Like Jackson, you watch Grace from the outside as she spirals deeper into insanity. Like Jackson, you get one moment of genuine contact —The guitar song in the last car ride. Before Grace walks into the fire and you, like Jackson, stop short of going in after her. You, like jackson, can’t comprehend why someone would do it, despite not being surprised at the final outcome.
There’s a line in Before Sunrise where Celine says that the most important thing two people can do is attempt to communicate. Succeeding not as important. That line is the thesis of the entire Before trilogy. Before Sunrise is the attempt going real good for a single night. Before Sunset is the cost of it being interrupted and its redemption. Before Midnight is what happens when two people who were great at the attempt start failing at it.
Die My Love is about the attempt breaking down completely at the get-go and then continously for the next almost 2 hours. Grace gives the prognosis,
“Where are you, Grace” “I’m right here. You just can’t see me” “I can’t go back” “I love you” “I love you”
“Enough.” is the legible moment she stops trying to communicate at all.
Before Midnight ends ambiguously. Celine and Jess, older, hollower, and bickering, and full of regrets. On its own, the takeway is nhilism. Why even bother to communicate when it ends like this? But that’s not right. The prior two films provided the weight of what’s being risked. The audience fills the ambiguity with hope because Before Sunrise and Before Sunset places something there to hope with.
Die My Love is trying to something similar with the guitar scene. Giving you a glimpse of what Grace and Jackson’s love actually felt like before everything broke. The problem it’s a single scene that arrives near the end, after a relentless 2 hours. To the viewer ‘enough’ is a confirmation of hopelessness rather.
On the surface level the movie is about the devastation wrought by postpartum to personal identity and romantic relationships. But the deeper takeaway is how it feels from the inside watching someone you used to know go crazy and then being helpless to do anything about it.
There’s a Bill Burr joke. He’s walking down a sidewalk minding his own business when all of sudden he gets bullied off the pavement by an angry butch lady. In a stroke of insight Burr observes she’s probably in a foul mood because of her crazy non-sensical girlfriend, because you know, crazy inexplicable girlfriends are part of the hetero guy’s implicit environment.
So the irony is that audiences watching Die My Love will come away understanding what it’s like to love someone you can’t reach. This is a full reversal of the film’s stated intention.
The awareness agenda needs the empathy machine to run on Grace’s experience in order to produce understanding of postpartum in people who haven’t had it. The exterior formal direction makes that hard to execute. The unconverted leave having observed something they didn’t enter. They’re not exiting the movie theatre thinking to themselves, ’‘oh wow I should be more compassionate’ as they call up their moms in tears thanking them for being the best mother, ever.
Audiences leave with a somatic response to the depicted conditions. The isolation, the failing relationship. For better and worse, this will do quiet work on future real-life decisions without the viewer’s consent. The film basically functions as anti-natalist propaganda in its most effective moments.
I don’t think Ramsay intended this.
There’s a gap that exists in most relationships. Grace and Jackson select each other for compatibility with a specific kind of romantic life. Unmarried, childless, the cabin in the woods, the creative autonomy, the beautiful irresponsiblity of it all. The pregnancy and what came along with it was a crisis the relationship was not built to withstand.
I find it deeply hilarious that a flim about what it’s like to spiral into insanity from the inside ends up being received as a portrait of what it’s like to watch someone else go insane from the outside.