The Man I Love review: Ira Sachs mistakes restraint for depth at Cannes

A Cannes competition title where theatre, illness and desire stay trapped behind careful restraint.

There is an unwritten law of contemporary cinema that says gay male directors who lived through the 1980s are eventually permitted to make their AIDS film. Fair enough. Some wounds belong to the people who carried them. But Ira Sachs' The Man I Love becomes a frustrating reminder that possessing the right to tell a story does not automatically make the telling urgent.

Opening with footage from André Brassard's Once Upon a Time in the East, Sachs initially gestures toward something far richer than what follows. In the clip, Carmen (Sophie Clément) rehearses a Québécois folk song in a drag club, though Sachs overlays the sequence with swelling operatic music instead of allowing us to hear the original sound. Ironically, the audience will hear plenty of it soon enough, as Rami Malek's Jimmy repeatedly rehearses the same number throughout. The imagery suggests performance, memory, translation and queer inheritance all colliding at once. For a moment, it seems as though that operatic emotionality might carry through the entire work.

Instead, the director settles into something far more subdued, and far more familiar. Set in an oddly muted New York during the AIDS crisis, the story follows Jimmy, an actor preparing an off-Broadway adaptation of Brassard's film in which he is to play Carmen. Jimmy is ill, though his deterioration is treated less as a bodily reality than another solemn artistic metaphor. Once again, we are given the image of the suffering creative slowly consuming himself for art.

Jimmy's partner Dennis (Tom Sturridge) is almost impossibly patient and supportive. Their relationship is disrupted by Vincent (Luther Ford), the younger British neighbour downstairs, whose arrival initiates a love triangle that never becomes as dangerous, erotic or emotionally revealing as it should. Jimmy begins calling him Vinny, and the younger man increasingly becomes a symbol of interruption: youth, temptation and the fantasy of one final escape from routine.

There are moments where Sachs' ideas can be felt straining toward something more ambitious. The rehearsal room should be electrically charged territory, a place where performance, gender and illness collapse into one another. Jimmy playing Carmen could have opened up fascinating tensions between theatrical femininity and gay male mortality, between Tremblay's world and Sachs' New York. Yet the material rarely moves beyond implication. The references remain curated rather than alive, arranged carefully behind glass.

The larger issue is Malek's performance. His portrayal is disappointingly mannered, composed almost entirely of tremors, pauses and a perpetual look of exhausted fragility, as though Jimmy's suffering had been predetermined rather than discovered scene by scene. Toward the end, while Dennis bathes him, Jimmy begins reciting the St Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. The sequence is clearly intended to devastate, but lands with the heavy symbolism of an actor dying while emptied of his lines. The meaning is obvious. The emotion never fully arrives.

At one point, as Jimmy and Vincent grow closer, Vincent asks him: "Don't you ever get tired of routine?" It is the question the audience eventually wants to ask Sachs himself. For a story about theatre, desire, illness and artistic obsession, The Man I Love is shockingly bloodless.

Sachs has made perceptive works about intimacy before, but here restraint curdles into caution. What remains is polished, respectable and emotionally distant. Respectability, however, is a deadly instinct for material that should feel messy, aching, erotic and alive.

Director: Ira Sachs

‍Writer: Ira Sachs, Maurício Zacharias

‍Cast: Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, Luther Ford

‍Production: Big Creek Projects, Assemble Media, Merino Films, SBS Productions

‍Running Time: 96 minutes

‍Rating: 2.5/5