"Love will tear us apart" can be heard at the end - in a version sung by the director herself! - and this sums up what Lynne Ramsay had previously spent 118 excessive minutes talking about: "Die My Love" is about the end of a love affair, but it is not told as a classic relationship drama, but rather as an impressionistic frenzy that is often exhausting, but always thrilling.
A remote, more than dilapidated house somewhere in the heart of America is to become their new home: Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) are free-living, free-thinking artists - she writes, he makes music - who want to escape the big city and its temptations. Civilization seems very distant; only Jackson's ageing mother Pam (Sissy Spacek) lives not too far away.
Initially, the self-imposed loneliness has a more than stimulating effect on the couple, the alcohol flows freely, the sex is wild and soon a child is born. And so the problems begin, slowly but unstoppably. Grace seems increasingly irritated, less and less willing to conform to society's prescribed role of the caring mother, while Jackson disappears more and more often for work (but also for affairs) and the loneliness puts additional strain on Grace.
It's been eight years since Scottish director Lynne Ramsay last made a film, the dark thriller "You Were Never Really Here", in which Joaquin Phoenix was as good as he's ever been and fully committed to Ramsay's vision. Something similar can now be said about Jennifer Lawrence, who has been a little quieter in recent years, but who is now back with a brilliant performance that is just as excessive as the film.
As always, Ramsay doesn't build it up in a linear but impressionistic way, she tells the story stringently but elliptically, jumping back and forth between scenes set in the future and the present, hinting at the beginnings of Grace and Jackson's relationship in sporadic flashbacks, but above all at the life of her mother-in-law Pam and his now deceased husband Harry (Nick Nolte).
"We all go a bit crazy in the first year," Pam says to her daughter-in-law at one point, although it's not entirely clear whether she's talking about the first year of marriage or the first year after the birth of a child - or both. In any case, history repeats itself and the patterns of a relationship are difficult to change. While Pam obviously had problems with Harry but stayed with him until his death (and is still ironing his shirts months later), Grace finds it hard to conform to convention, to fit into her role as mother and housewife.
If a man had made this movie, he would probably be accused of feasting on the increasingly unstable state of a woman slowly drifting into psychosis and exhibiting her suffering. As a woman's view of another woman, however, "Die My Love", for all its excess, comes across as a sensitive, increasingly tragic look at a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown who defies the conventions made by men with everything she has. The fact that in the end it is Lynne Ramsay herself who sings a wonderfully gentle version of the legendary Joy Divison song "Love will tear us apart" finally sums up the intentions of this often exhausting but equally stirring film.
