by Aksharaa Agarwal
There is a mountain, and at the edge of it is madness. At this mountain edge of a still, silently unfolding madness, with heaving breath, Die My Love plays out.
The many aspects of narrative can be analysed in microscopic, fragmented minutiae. There is the woman, hysteria. She cracks, then bursts open, a bleeding, beating heart, a pulsating core. There is the breakdown of domesticity despite a perfect idyll background, the promise of perfection laden in eager youth and the picturesque. That first joke, ‘We’ll need a broom’. There is the rage at the heart of early motherhood, a woman resisting the death of her ferocity for the sake of a sterile resurrection. Generations of decay haunt undeniable portents of despair, that slow climb down the slope of life, into their progeny. A complex network of tensions spear-armed by pain, release, animalism, liberty, propriety, legacy and ephemeral permanence coalesce.
Finally the open American country, as easy to home oneself in as to get lost in. Receiving, embracing, then engulfing in equal measure, the constance of presence and effort spinwheeling within. Waves lapping on a shore, Grace and Jackson, a tug of rope. It’s Andrew Wyeth’s Christie’s World set to country music, classical imagery, and regimented catharsis.
Each of these aspects could be taken separately, but if one leans and learns you know immediately not to touch if you won’t just bite in, whole. Tap in, restless, relentless and raw. Receive. You’ll find it wild as berries in a forest if unattuned. To the richly palated, its explosion is an exquisite delight.
There are no words because there cannot be, there are no names or limits or boundaries. Everything seems ‘of course’. Of course Grace, embodied, resists by sheer, simple existence the prospect of being boxed in, rendered wordless. Of course Grace is a given. And of course, Grace is not to be taken for granted. Even within the four walls she finds herself all the time in, she is thrown open, everywhere, the house and the woods and the whole wide world.
So there is nothing rural, matrimonial, maternal, mental or morbid about it, not really. What is, remains much more than that at all times. Why fetter the unfettered? We must all be so bold.
Unfettered then, the Orpheus to her enfranchised, unleashed Eurydice, Jackson is the undeniable thread through which she weaves an unchained melody. The ‘Body Electric’. It only works when both play along. And when one taps out, leaving the other hanging, the game changes. It has to. It’s particle physics, it’s quantum entanglement. Othello. One flips and the other flips. Checkers. One jumps and the other is captured. More threads to the tapestry. Glove box gum. Glass, guns, guitars. The Great unwritten American Novel.
Why dwell? For these are the gifts of taking it as it comes, the images and faces and sounds all together. Formally cohesive, barely contained, a knife edge and beast, all subjugated to plot. Thrown into a rusted van and off a cliff. Impossible not to addendum with dreams and metaphors (as amply evident in what is not so much a review as a reverie).
There will be much acclaim to big names, praise for performance, vision, tact in spite of tactlessness, and more to come. All well earned. I cannot speak to its source material, but Die My Love raises a whip to crack open a piñata. It invites you, as stiffly as you sit, to rush in for the downpour. Go in, on all fours.
Live a little unleashed, then some more. Never be so polite, you forget your power. After all, it’s all you can do before you die. If you buy a ticket you may find yourself not in a seat but on a teetering precipice, poised there unknowingly by the opening shot. Stay.
Walk through.
A step in the brush that strikes, Die My Love invites you to live, truly live, wild. Nothing will prepare you for it because nothing can. Meet you at that mountain edge.