The Man I Love review – Rami Malek needs a lighter touch in Ira Sachs’ 80s Aids drama

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Cannes film festival: Sachs’ film about an HIV-positive actor in the homophobic Reagan-era 80s is well-intended, but Malek’s mannered performance is hard to love This film from writer-director Ira Sachs gives us premium-strength, undiluted Rami Malek – but I have to say that his overripe performance and self-conscious mannerisms here are perhaps even more oppressively insistent for being conveyed relatively quietly in spoken dialogue. And not quietly at all in the singing scenes. Malek is a performer whose style is as distinctive as those of John Malkovich or Jeff Goldblum. But it works best with a light touch in the direction and material. Things never really come together here. The Man I Love is a film about gay culture in 1980s New York, at the height of the reactionary homophobia of Reagan’s America, with HIV-positive men coming to terms with their condition and with the callous bigotry of the political zeitgeist. In one hospital scene, we see the authorities’ icily unsympathetic ...
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‘Life can be complicated’: Rachel Weisz on balancing privacy with stardom

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Her latest TV series calls for her to play both twins in a reworking of Cronenberg’s dark and bloody classic, Dead Ringers. But Rachel Weisz, the famously private Oscar-winner, is used to stepping in and out of roles

There’s quite a lot of blood. There’s really quite a lot of blood in Dead Ringers, but it’s not the blood of bullet holes or stab wounds, or any of the other violences one might expect in a dark psychological thriller like this. It’s blood on knickers and operating tables, and smeared on silk shirts, and the blood as a baby’s head crowns – the bloods of birth and loss, guttural screams, and in the middle of it all, Rachel Weisz, twice.

In David Cronenberg’s original 1988 film, a grisly examination of the relationship between the physical and mental self, Jeremy Irons played twin gynaecologists whose dubious ethics led to all manner of horrors. In this gender-swapped adaptation, in which Weisz stars and exec-produced, she plays those twins identical in every way but character. Dr Beverly Mantle is the shy moral introvert, whose love affair with a patient triggers a psychic unravelling between the sisters, while Elliot is a modern mad scientist, hungry for meat, drugs, conflict, godliness, sex. What could come off as a soapy trick, in Weisz’s Oscar-winning hands becomes camply surreal, uncanny, seductive, a little perverse – joy.

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