The You Were Never Really Here filmmaker has little time for one critical reading of her new film, Die, My Love. More below.
It’s been an eventful few days for Lynne Ramsay's new film. Following its Cannes debut on Saturday, the We Need To Talk About Kevin director’s latest effort was picked up by MUBI for a widely reported $20m, before someone did some more sums and put the price tag at $24m. At the same time, Die, My Love may or may not have lost the comma in its name, turning the whole thing into either a grammatical nightmare or an English-German co-production. Everyone’s spelling it differently, anyway – I showed a review to a copy-editor friend, and she exploded.
Starring Jennifer Lawrence (also producing) alongside Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield and Sissy Spacek, the film charts a woman’s mental struggles following the birth of her new son. After a polarising critical debut (the gist: “Jennifer Lawrence good, why is there no plot”), Lynne Ramsay hasn’t stayed simply taken her unspecified-$20m-ish and run. In a chat with film journalist and critic Elvis Mitchell yesterday afternoon (per Deadline), the director said of the critical discourse: “This whole postpartum 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.”
Reviews have indeed largely focused on the post-partum depression angle, the phrase popping up in pieces from BBC Culture, AV Club, Deadline, The Guardian and any other review site I can find. Ramsay will be equally miffed with the opening paragraph of the film’s Wikipedia entry, which currently reads: “Based on the 2017 novel by Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz, [the film] centers around a new mother who develops postpartum depression and enters psychosis.” Oops.
For her part, Ramsay is often cheerily outspoken about responses to her films. In response to a viewer describing Kevin as “one long, violent argument against having children” in 2011, she told The Observer: “Man, people are funny. They bring their own stuff… That’s where people seem to be getting their knickers in a twist”.
Whether or not Die, My Love (or Die My Love) is actually about postpartum depression, it’s nice to see critic-filmmaker spats making a return to Cannes. Here’s hoping for many more when the film starts its press tour proper.
