‘Blood on the lips’: sex and steroids in Kristen Stewart’s craziest and wildest movie | Culture

Kristen Stewart is a generational idol who is difficult to resist. The actress with the most beautiful eyes in Hollywood has the eye of the eye tattooed on her right arm. Guernica by Picasso. Heir to Jodie Foster in the Olympus of LGTBI stars, Stewart played her daughter at the age of 12 in the thriller by David Fincher The panic room. Since then, his filmography is the fascinating mirror of such a popular career (the saga of Twilight) as complex and daring (Trip to Sils María, Personal shopper, Spencer). At 34 years old, she has become an open muse queersomething unthinkable not so long ago, Stewart once again offers samples of his particular instinct as a star in the crazy and wild blood on the lips.

Directed by the British Rose Glass —who debuted in 2019 with the surprising Saint Mauda horror and sanctity film set on the English coast whose vitiated atmosphere looked to some references of New Hollywood—, blood on the lips immerses yourself in a world of rednecks and bodybuilding of deep America to configure a landscape in which the imagery of Hulk-like body terror intersects with a certain fantasy trash of ShowgirlsPaul Verhoeven’s post-feminist cult film.

Stewart’s character is that of a unfortunate woman with shaved, greasy hair who works at a roadside gym in New Mexico. Her routine, presented as a crude parade of sewage and garbage, will stop when an explosive bodybuilder appears at the store. But the torrid display of sex and steroids will soon transform into something else, a thriller and a violent revenge film in which Glass deploys an imaginary that crosses the romantic flight forward of Thelma and Louise with the subversive look at the body of titanby Julia Ducournau.

With this cocktail of references, the director frames her criminal drama in an eighties aesthetic that exudes humor and violence. Glass relies on the charisma of Stewart but also on the muscular sensuality of Katy O’Brian and on an electric actor, Ed Harris, in the role of the protagonist’s gangster father. The father-daughter relationship knows little, but Harris, a bald man with long hair who seems to be taken from a countercultural comic—it is impossible not to think of the Slober from the artist Ceesepe’s first comics—functions as an unbridled patriarchal shadow. But if the crazy game of this sordid and romantic film comes together, and that includes its extravagant finale, it is thanks to Stewart, who in addition to displaying her talent as an actress, delves into her profitable heroine image. neopunk and queer.

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