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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Timestalker review – Alice Lowe’s anti-romcom is a darkly hilarious spin through history

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The actor and film-maker’s ingenious comedy sees her play a gamut of characters who meet gory ends chasing a not-worth-it love interest

The Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly – but couldn’t be sure if the butterfly wasn’t the one having the dream about him. Film-maker Alice Lowe dreams her way into a cosmically recurring persona in this likably chaotic, flawed comedy; she plays a woman who regenerates Blackadderishly throughout the years, from the 1680s to the 1980s, forever in love with the same man, forever destined to sacrifice herself for him, almost but not quite in possession of the knowledge that this guy is unworthy of her. At each stage, the incarnations of the past are perhaps dream-memories and the personae of the future are prophecies. Or … is she just very, very mad?

In 1688, Lowe is Agnes, a humble Scottish maidservant who is enamoured of a heretical preacher (Aneurin Barnard) who is about to be executed. In 1793, she is a poutingly bored noblewoman who conceives an erotic fascination for a dandy highwayman in the Adam Ant style, with the memorably annoying name of Alex O’Nine Ribbons (again Barnard). And in 1980, with leg-warmers and a frizzy hairstyle which makes her look like Barry Gibb or the Cowardly Lion, she plays a British woman in a drolly unconvincing-looking New York who has become a stalker-superfan of a new romantic pop star (Barnard once more). In addition, she is briefly to be seen as a magician’s assistant in Cleopatra costume in 1940 and even more briefly – almost subliminally – as some kind of Jane Eyre-ish schoolmarm in 1847 who is decapitated by a carriage wheel. (This last episode is so bafflingly fleeting that some of it must surely have been lost in the edit.)

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