In Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, which played Cannes this year and adapts Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 novel of the same name, Jennifer Lawrence plays Grace, a new mother experiencing postpartum psychosis and inhabited by isolation, fury and despair. In one scene, she comes home incandescent and locks herself in the bathroom. Her gaze lights up the room; her appetite to destroy is insatiable. In so many other films, you’d cut to the next scene: Grace opening her eyes, shaking her head at such perverse fantasies. This is the real world. Thank God, she didn’t blow it all up. But Ramsay lets her do it: smeared cosmetics, shattered glass, jagged tiles; she ravages everything. It feels like, as Sydney writes on , “destroying myself just to prove I exist.”
Thinking about Jeanne Dielman for the past few months, how it came to life and its impact on everything that came after it, I couldn’t help but believe that Delphine Seyrig would have been so good at smashing everything up, as the eponymous housewife in that boxy Belgium apartment in Akerman’s story.
Instead, we remain—to the film’s credit and, sadly, truer to the lives we often suffer—“fracturing and splintering on a knife’s edge away from some kind of annihilation,” as Xuanlin puts it. There is some kind of release, which we’ll get to, but it only comes after three hours of “self-denial”, per Sally, which leads to what “could be seen as a defeat of [Jeanne’s] self-control, and that unleashes all of her pent up… well, self. She lashes out and retakes that control.”
