'The Man I Love' Review: Rami Malek in Ira Sachs' Queer Love Triangle
Rami Malek in 'The Man I Love.'
Cannes Film Festival
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Ira Sachs has been on an incredible career roll lately, with three consecutive features digging into the complex inner lives of gay men in distinctive ways, reaffirming the director’s position among the preeminent movie chroniclers of queer experience. Whether or not it’s intended, those three entries could be considered an unofficial trilogy. Sachs’ emotionally charged latest, The Man I Love, revolves around an unapologetically narcissistic lead character not unlike the Franz Rogowski role in 2023’s Passages and shares a fascination with bringing verbatim texts to life with last year’s Peter Hujar’s Day — in that case as a diaristic literary project, this time as performance art.
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Without ever leaving its single apartment set except to step onto the terrace, Peter Hujar’s Day revealed not just the photographer but a time capsule of the downtown New York art scene in the mid 1970s, roughly speaking, the window between peak Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. The Man I Love skips forward a decade to the late ‘80s, shifting its gaze to the alternative theater and performance scene when stage companies like the Wooster Group were pushing boundaries and venues like the Pyramid Club were booking drag acts and post-punk bands.
The Man I Love
The Bottom Line
An elegy defiantly tethered to life.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Rebecca Hall. Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Luther Ford, Sasha Lane, Maisy Stella, Amy Carlson, Stephen Adly-Guirgis, Jahi Di’Allo Winston, Dennis Courtis, Blanka Zizka
Director: Ira Sachs
Screenwriters: Ira Sachs, Mauricio Zacharias
1 hour 37 minutes
Rami Malek is transformative as Jimmy George, a downtown theater artist with a fictional experimental group called The Mechanicals. He seems as famous for his louche charms as his stage acts and has been throwing himself into rehearsals for a new piece following a period of hospitalization with AIDS-related illness.
That project is a word-for-word recreation of a forgotten French-Canadian queer film from 1974, called Once Upon a Time in the East. It follows a day-in-the-life of a group of marginalized Montreal outsiders that includes a toughened singer named Carmen, to be played by Jimmy in drag with a blond wig. Sachs describes the original film: “As if Altman’s Nashville had been made by Fassbinder.”
The fractious but communal atmosphere of rehearsals spills over into Jimmy’s homelife, in an apartment that frequently becomes a sort of salon for his close-knit circle. A party at which guests go around the table, each of them singing a song in an eclectic mix, seems precisely the kind of gathering that is Jimmy’s lifeblood.
He lives with longterm boyfriend Dennis (Tom Sturridge), who provides stability, loyalty and care, making sure Jimmy eats and organizing his meds. A ravishing moment early on in which their arms seek out each other at the dining table, tracing body contours they know as well as their own, is quintessential Sachs, the rare American filmmaker completely unselfconscious in his depiction of queer sex and sensuality as a shared language.
While the movie belongs to Malek — who makes Jimmy both languorous and revitalized by creativity, weakened by declining health but hurling himself with ferocious tenacity into whatever life he has left — Sturridge is the stealth MVP. With an impressive economy of means, the actor gets at something fundamental to the relationship between artists and their partners, comfortably occupying the tight spaces left available by a magnetic man who sucks up most of the oxygen in a room without even trying. Dennis is a character not given to big emotional displays, but I found Sturridge’s performance ineffably moving.
When their downstairs neighbor Leslie (Maisy Stella) introduces them to her new Brit roommate Vincent (Luther Ford), he is instantly drawn to Jimmy and his whole Bohemian aura. For Jimmy, the high of having an attractive young man intoxicated by him provides another opportunity to tighten his hold on life, making it inevitable that they start sleeping together.
It’s assumed but unsaid that the relationship between Jimmy and Dennis is — or at least in the past was — a somewhat open one. Still the flickers of hurt t