Last year, the Cannes Film Festival produced three best actress nominees at the Oscars. This year's edition may have just supplied another.
In Lynne Ramsay's “Die, My Love,” Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson play a married couple with a newborn who move into an old country house. In Ramsay's messy and moving marital psychodrama, Lawrence plays an increasingly unhinged young mother named Grace whose postpartum depression reaches darkly hallucinatory extremes.
For Lawrence, the 34-year-old mother of two, making “Die, My Love” was an intensely personal experience.
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“It was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what (Grace) would do,” Lawrence told reporters Sunday. “I had just had my firstborn, and there’s not really anything like postpartum. It’s extremely isolating. She doesn’t have a community. She doesn’t have her people. But the truth is, extreme anxiety and extreme depression is isolating, no matter where you are. You feel like an alien."
“Die, My Love,” which is in competition for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, was one of the most anticipated premieres of the festival. That was owed partly to the widely respect for Ramsey, the Scottish director of “Ratcatcher" (1999), “Movern Callar” (2002) and “ You Were Never Really Here” (2017). Lawrence sought her out for the film.
“I’ve wanted to work with Lynne Ramsay since I saw 'Ratcatcher' and I was like, ‘There’s no way,'” said Lawrence. “But we took a chance, and we sent it to her. And I really, I cannot believe that I’m here with you.”
In Ramsay's “Die, My Love," adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 novel, is disorienting experience, pulsating with animalistic urges and manic spurts of violence. As a portrait of a marriage in trouble, it makes “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” look tame.
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“Die, My Love" was quickly snapped up by Mubi on Sunday. In easily the biggest sale of the festival, the indie distributor plunked down $24 million for distribution rights to the film in the U.S. and multiple other territories.
Lawrence's performance, in particular, drew the kind of raves in Cannes that tend to lead to Oscar consideration. Lawrence has been nominated four times by the Academy Awards, winning once for 2013's “Silver Linings Playbook.”
Since then, much has changed for Lawrence, including becoming a mother. On Saturday, Lawrence said parenthood has been such an enriching experience for her that, she joked, "I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.”
“Having children changes everything. It changes your whole life. It’s brutal and incredible," Lawrence said. “I didn’t know that I could feel so much.”
“My job has a lot to do with emotion, and they’ve opened up the world to me,” she added. "It’s almost like feeling like a blister or something. So sensitive. So they’ve changed my life, obviously, for the best, and they’ve changed me creatively.”
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Pattinson, who recently had his first child with Suki Waterhouse, chimed in that he found having a baby “gives you the biggest trove of energy and inspiration.”
Lawrence mockingly pounced on him: “You get energy?!”
Pattinson let out a sigh. “This question is impossible for a guy to answer correctly,” he said, to laughter.