“The Man I Love” brings director Ira Sachs to the competition for the second time, after “Frankie” in 2019. It’s the kind of film that might sound familiar in description, but it’s made with such detail and care that it feels lived-in, not just dramatized. It is set in New York in the late 1980s, and there is a causal conviction in the way the production design recreates the era of videotapes, “non-stop walking bars,” and the city’s experimental theater. (The film was also shot on film, something that cannot be taken for granted these days.)
The story is about Jimmy George (Rami Malek), a happy-go-lucky theater artist—not a performing artist, he insists—who has made himself the center of many people’s lives, on purpose or not. Those people include Dennis (Tom Sturridge), his longtime partner, who watches with a mixture of patience and concern; Vincent (Luther Ford), a British immigrant in Jimmy’s building who is attracted to his magnetism; and Brenda (Rebecca Hall), Jimmy’s sister, who moves between Jimmy’s counter-cultural environment and the traditional world of their family. At first, he apologizes to Dennis because his parents didn’t invite him to their anniversary party.
Jimmy’s instability is on full display as he prepares for a new stage play inspired by a 1970s French Canadian film. Rehearsal scenes (other team members played by Stephen Adly Guirgis and Sasha Lane) are shown for a long time, and towards the end of the film, Jimmy has something like a “Firing Bull” moment in his dressing room as he runs through the lines on his big night.
Offstage, Jimmy gets close to Vincent, helping him carry the mattress to his house. Dennis looks at Vincent carefully when he brings the bottle of wine, maybe because Dennis has seen this all before, but also because he’s worried about both men.
Brenda is happy to see Jimmy happy and wants her teenage son to know him: “It makes him happy to see his uncle around, especially now that he is busy and happy with a new show,” she tells her husband, Gene (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). Gene is very skeptical: Jimmy’s current situation will not last, he says, and that will be difficult for the boy. There is a powerful scene where the son, Billy (Dennis Courtis), records Jimmy on a camcorder as Jimmy delivers a secret confession about his wild experiences with sex and drugs, directed at his parents. It feels like it’s one of the last chances he’ll get to put his cards on the table.
Because the film is set in New York, with gay characters, in the 1980s, it should come as no surprise that the story involves AIDS. But one of the strengths of “The Man I Love” is that it keeps AIDS in the background until relatively late: The film is not just an AIDS drama or a gay drama, but a drama about the process of theater production, the tensions of family and romantic relationships, and caring for a loved one whose love for you is absent—and perhaps immeasurable. (In that, there is an echo of Sachs’s “Verses” from three years ago; both films he wrote with Mauricio Zacharias.) The romance is shown with great complexity: Jimmy and Vincent do not avoid physical contact despite the danger, and there is a sweat in intimate scenes that is refreshing. The film’s worldview is best summed up by Brenda: “It’s a tough business, life,” she says.
Cannes regular Christophe Honoré (“Marcello Mio”) is somewhat successful in evoking a bygone era “Marriage with an Orange Flavor.” (I’m leaving that British “U” in “taste,” according to the film’s official material, at least until the inevitable title change.) This unruly French group drama, shown in the Cannes Premiere section, focuses on a wedding on March 11, 1978—specifically, the day of the death of French singer Claude François, an episode of electro-39 think about what is meant to be a happy gathering.
If you gave me an “Orange-Tasty” family tree and gave me a week in advance to learn about more than a dozen main characters, I’m still not sure I could follow everything. Never a highly trained storyteller, Honoré, who wrote and directed, relegates viewers to dysfunctional family dynamics in medias res and never clarifies much from there. Although most of the film is about the wedding ceremony, the story only goes on three times—once to show the ghost apologizing to his mother, which is the kind of stylistic deviation that should have stayed on the page.
An absent father, mental instability, drug abuse, cancer, PTSD from wartime experiences in Algeria—it’s all mentioned in the film, but nothing is addressed in any depth. Only Adèle Exarchopoulos, as the worried sister of the groom, is able to create a character that commands attention from scene to scene.
