The American Ari Aster was previously known primarily as a specialist in horror films. He recently broke new ground with the psychological drama ‘Beau Is Afraid’ (2023). Like there, Joaquin Phoenix plays the leading role in his new film ‘Eddington’. The reactions in Cannes were mixed. ‘Eddington’ is a small town somewhere in New Mexico. We are in 2020, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Joaquin Phoenix as Sheriff Joe Cross suffers from asthma and doesn't like face masks because he can't breathe. He soon clashes with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who wants to build a technology park and promises the town a bright future. When the sheriff decides to run for mayor in the upcoming election, a showdown follows between the two men.
The sheriff lovingly looks after his wife Louise (Emma Stone), a neurotic artist. When she leaves him for an esoteric New Age guru (Austin Butler), he loses his inner balance and goes crazy. His frustration finally erupts in a violent finale.
Ari Aster tells this neo-Western as a political satire with sideswipes at lockdown hysteria, political correctness and the Black Lives Matter movement. While he mercilessly takes the personal rivalries of the two opponents to extremes, the small town becomes a microcosm of American paranoia.
Lynne Ramsay's ‘Die, My Love’ is also about extreme emotional conditions. The film is based on a novel of the same name by Argentinian author Ariana Harwicz. The film adaptation stars Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson in the principal roles. After the two stars signed autographs and posed for selfies, they were celebrated on the red carpet as the perfect Hollywood couple. In Lynne Ramsay's film, however, the two are anything but a dream couple. Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Pattinson) move from New York to Montana to a run-down house that belonged to a deceased uncle. She is a writer, he does various jobs that involve a lot of travelling. After having wild sex on the kitchen floor, Grace becomes pregnant and has to look after her young son. She actually wanted to write a novel, but she never gets round to it. Instead, she develops symptoms of postnatal depression and spirals into an almost psychotic state. She throws everything on the floor in the bathroom and creates total chaos. At other times she bangs her forehead on the mirror or throws herself through a glass door.
Her tendency towards self-mutilation takes on ever more threatening forms. Added to this is an increasing lack of desire on the part of her husband Jackson, a form of ‘genital numbing’, as Wilhelm Reich would say. After spending some time in a psychiatric clinic, she seems to feel better. She bakes a cake and wants to look more after the house. But the improvement is only temporary. Grace begins an affair with a married black neighbour, she develops disturbing fantasies and imagines burning down the house or running naked through a burning forest.
The film offers no clear explanations for her extreme behaviour. The way Jennifer Lawrence goes to extremes in her role is courageous and deeply shocking. No wonder she has a good chance of winning the award for best actress. Just as ‘Die, My Love’ received a powerful yet controversial echo in Cannes. Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay is known for the radical, uncompromising way in which she tells her stories. She was most recently presented in the Cannes competition with ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ (2011) and ‘You Were Never Really Here’ (2017). ‘Die, My Love’ is only her fifth feature film since 1999; many of the projects she has been involved in failed to materialise. When I asked her in an interview years ago, when the lack of female representation was a much-discussed topic, how she felt as a female director in the competition, she said in a laconic way that she didn't want to be invited to Cannes as a woman, but because of the quality of her film. The quality of ‘Die, My Love’ is beyond doubt.