WTT Dispatch #27: Love Lies Bleeding & Bound
How have pulp lesbian romances evolved from 1996 to now?
From the start, Love Lies Bleeding gets physical with Pumping Iron visuals, plopping us in the pit of the dingy Crater Gym, in Nowheresville, New Mexico, where you try to sweat out your evil ways. “Only Losers Quit” and other motivational signs stencil the dirty walls as patrons grunt and lift.
Looking like she’s done her hair with a weedwhacker, Kristen Stewart stars as Lou, stuck at a dead-end do-it-all job at the Crater. After her shift, she hops into her wreck of a pickup and returns to her messy apartment and sweet ginger cat. She cracks a copy of Pat Califia’s Macho Sluts for an evening wank and does it all again the next day.
Lou’s understandably pleased when the impressive form of Jackie (Katy O’Brian) breaks into her sleepy routine. This buff drifter’s blowing through town on her way to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. Realizing this is the hottest thing to ever occur at Crater Gym, Lou immediately hooks up with the new arrival (even if Jackie is perhaps motivated to use her lover for a place to crash and gratis access to egg white omelets). But for Lou, making breakfast is a small price to pay to watch Jackie show off her bodybuilding poses (not to mention her inspirational form whilst doing pull ups on highway underpass). Lou’s job also offers access to a marvelous array of steroids to shoot in Jackie’s tight glutes. When the needle goes in, we see Jackie’s muscles pop and hear her veins course.
What’s the only thing that can ruin this sexy idyll? Men. In the small town, Lou can’t escape the gravity of her dad, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris, digging into the crazy old loon phase of his career), who runs a well-attended shooting range and restaurant. He’s deputized by J.J. (“Dirtbag” Dave Franco), a mulleted shithead who assists with Lou Sr.’s extracurricular gun-smuggling operation.
J.J. is not a good husband to Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone), a wear-your-black-eyes-and-bake-you-apple-pies kind of wife. And Lou is unaware that J.J. enjoyed a parking lot rutting session with Jackie when she first reached town, seeking leads for any remunerative employment (his summary of the encounter: “That was magical.”)
The plot really kicks in when J.J. beats Beth into a coma. Lou Sr. wants the miscreant to be left alone but Jackie take matters into her meaty hands. Lou’s got her back: “Are you threatening me?” Lou Sr. hisses, dripping with menace. “Yep,” his daughter answers. Events spiral from there and Lou Sr., who always takes the “no body no crime” approach to disposing of evidence, gets thrown off his game by Jackie’s colossal presence.
If that’s not enough, the most ardent of Lou’s local admirers, Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), keeps following her crush around and espying incriminating scenes. (Like a crucial moment when she catches Lou at a red light—just awful luck in a one stoplight town.)
Director Rose Glass conjures the hapless criminal enterprises of early Coen Brothers films, (and her characters make bad choices at a pace that would do the Safdie Brothers proud) but still maintains a style all her own. There’s an unusual, woozy tonality about Lou and Jackie’s sexy-but-doomed courtship. Sound warps, images warp, and mildly supernatural events occur within otherwise realistic circumstances (this mood is underlined by Clint Mansell’s mobius-strip score).
Following on from the freaky Saint Maud, Love Lives Bleeding builds on Glass’s invigorating body of work. Her main characters seem to share a total resolve about what they’re doing, no matter how dramatically ill-advised. Jackie, consumed by burgeoning roid rage, is going to make that strongman competition in Vegas, even if it means drawing the attention of every cop in the Southwest. My biggest quibble with Glass is that, after the sweaty opening sequence, I craved more inside scoop on the bodybuilding world and a greater sense of Jackie’s obsession with the game.
But Stewart and O’Brian’s sterling work carries the day and Glass makes us just as desperate for romance as her leads.
3.5 out of 5 stars
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Love Lies Bleeding is now in theaters. Rated R. Running time 1:44.
I don’t believe I ever saw Bound in my youth, a surprising fact given the quantity of smutty Blockbuster entertainments I took in on VHS tape. My only memory of this film was a promotional photo that looked like an awful lot of fun. But all the better to see this treat with lily fresh eyes.
In classic noir fashion, we open with lust at first sight. Into an elevator slinks Corky (Gina Gershon), who delivers a…very frank…look at Violet (Jennifer Tilly), whose beau, Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), remains oblivious. Corky heads to work in an apartment she’s refurbishing, and Violet unlocks the flat just next door. No adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice can boast a new hunk in town more drenched in sexuality than Gershon and her peerless ex-con swagger.
Corky often twists her mouth into a perfect sneer and punctuates her cheekbones with grease. She sports boys BVDs, a dingy white tank top, and tuff grrl earrings that double as lockpicks. And she doesn’t mess about with the renovations—she snakes a yucky clogged bathtub drain with much more aplomb than Kristen Stewart unclogging toilets in Love Lies Bleeding (Corky also rattles around in an old pickup).
In contrast to Gershon’s snarling eroticism, Tilly remains perfectly poised, using breathy damsel in distress vibes as she shrewdly considers her next move. She’ll say things like, “I’m nervous…thirsty maybe.” She keeps finding ways to drop by the apartment where Corky labors, bringing over some black coffee and telling her new friend, “Drop the cup off at any time.” In time, Violet’s tactics grow more aggressive—she sticks an expensive earring down the drain so Corky has to bend under the sink with a pipe wrench to retrieve it…a pure porn scenario that leads to a famous hookup scene.
Violet’s feigned delicacy disguises her mercilessness when she’s seeking an edge. While usually kittenish with Corky, she flashes steel every now and then—“I know who I am, I don’t need it tattooed on my shoulder.”
As a mafia underboss/cuckolded weirdo, Pantoliano’s Caesar taps into much of the same energy he brought to Ralphie Cifaretto in The Sopranos—a nervy, unsettled masculinity that’s quite moving at times. One minute he’s doing a Joe Pesci bit saying, “Capiche!” or telling at a corpse, “Who’s dead, fuck face?” and the next he’s simping for Violet. I did enjoy most of the interior decor in his apartment, particularly the bathroom, which is appointed with lovely white tile and towels (all the better to show off plenty of bright red blood). The gore offers a cheerful effect when splattered all over a pile of Caesar’s stolen lucre—he has to handwash the Ben Franklins and paper-clip them throughout the apartment to dry.
There are several fairly forgettable bit roles in Bound but all the juice is saved for one excellent one: hotheaded Johnnie Marzzone (Christopher Meloni, with iced out ears!!). He’s the Americanized son of a Sicilian don and his ham-handed approach to criminal conspiracies drives Caesar crazy, with combustible results.
The film, written and directed by the pre-Matrix Wachowskis, is confined for almost the entire runtime to the two adjoining apartments (and the characters only venture out to visit other indoor locations: lesbian leather bars, other mobsters’ lairs). Bound never gives Chicago vibes, probably because it was shot in Santa Monica. But there are interesting directorial flourishes, including recurring overhead shots and smoothly incorporated flashbacks.
The narrative, while always conforming to noir genre conventions, climaxes with a very compelling last 15 minutes—all doublecrosses are on the table and everyone rushes around on a knife edge. There’s a tasty scene in which a pair of stupid Chicago cops buy every lie Caesar and Violet tell them while stepping across blood-soaked carpets and ignoring the stack of corpses in the bathtub. Luckily, the ever-resourceful Corky has access to a lot of white paint to cover the evidence.
4 out of 5 stars
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Bound is streaming on Paramount+. Rated R. Running time 1:48.