I Just Saw

I just saw Love Lies Bleeding and it was really good. A lesbian romance crossed with a crime drama and set in the 1980s, it stars Kristen Stewart as a mulleted gym clerk, Lou, whose father, Lou Sr (Ed Harris), is a dangerous criminal in the Nevada desert. One day a young woman called Jackie (Katy O’Brian) rolls into town with dreams of building up her body mass so that she can go to Las Vegas and win a contest.  

Lou and Jackie fall for one another, but complications arise when JJ (Dave Franco), Lou Sr’s employee and his daughter Beth’s (Jena Malone) abusive, philandering husband, puts Beth in the hospital. High on steroids, Jackie sees Lou’s pain for her sister and does something there’s no coming back from… 

Initially, I asked myself why this story needed to be set in the 1980s, if it was just for the score and the picturesque fashions (like Jackie’s shell suit). But this is a story of its chosen period. Domestic abuse is still a pressing issue, of course, but how it’s dealt with here is very much attached to a bygone age. (One would hope.)  

Beth won’t press charges, so the police won’t take an interest (especially since a lot of them are in Lou Sr’s pocket), and her father’s approach is to have a talk with JJ. Meanwhile, Lou Sr’s own wife has been “gone” for years. This is very much a paternalistic, “father knows best” world where girls are raised to be seen and enjoyed and raise the children, but certainly not heard.  

Meanwhile, men do the important work and feel constantly entitled to women’s time, space, and bodies. The unspoken subtext about Jackie (or “Jack”, as Lou calls her) is that she became obsessed with bodybuilding as a way to defend herself against men. In one scene a bodybuilder punches her in the face simply for reacting badly when he calls her friend a slur and puts his hands on Jack without permission. 

The performances are really good. Franco does a grand job of playing a man who’s slime in human form, while Stewart conveys aching fragility and survivalism as Lou. Her nervous energy creates a character that plays off well against O’Brian’s equally wounded recluse. The story twists and turns pleasantly and has some moments of surrealistic filmmaking that lend it a magical realist air. 

Rating: 3/4