The 80s-set AIDS drama, starring Oscar winner Rami Malek, was greeted with a stirring standing ovation at its competition premiere on May 20.
Ira Sachs‘ The Man I Love received a warm standing ovation — 7 minutes — when it premiered Wednesday night in the main competition at the 79th Cannes Film Fest.
The film’s director and cast — Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge and Luther Ford — ascended the Palais des Festivals steps for the evening’s gala screening.
Set in New York circa 1984, The Man I Love centers on Jimmy George (Malek), a beloved queer entertainer living with AIDS who refuses to stop working — and is determined to mount a new theatrical production as time runs short. His world is anchored by his devoted partner Dennis (Sturridge) and complicated by a simmering affair with a younger neighbor, Vincent, played by Luther Ford in a beguiling feature-film debut.
Malek appears to have thrust himself into the awards conversation with this performance, which includes a genuine showstopper when, as Jimmy, he mournfully sings Melanie’s 1970 B-side, “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma,” to his family.
“This is lovely,” Sachs said. “This is a film about what we can bring to each other, through art, through love, through pain, through memory, and I hope there are some memories we share for this evening, for this festival, and for our love of cinema. … None of us will be here forever, just to say. But there are moments that we will remember, and I tried with this movie, with this incredible cast, to fill this movie with things that I want to remember. And now this night will be added to that.”
He took a moment to have everyone who helped make the movie raise a hand — some 100 people — then Sachs gestured to Malek, Sturridge and Ford, and thanked “the three men who gave of their souls to make this film possible.”
Sachs, who co-wrote the script with longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, drew inspiration from real-life experimental artists who continued creating until their final days, like Ron Vawter of The Wooster Group and pioneering gay comedian Frank Maya.
The Man I Love arrives only 16 months after Sachs’ previous feature, Peter Hujar’s Day, continuing one of the most quietly prolific and critically admired runs in American independent cinema. Four of his last seven features have received Spirit Award nominations for best feature, including the critically acclaimed Passages.
Malek: ‘I Had to Address the Fear’
Rami Malek wished to work with Ira Sachs for some time — going as far as to ask his reps to get him a meeting with the filmmaker. But when he got the script for Sachs’ The Man I Love— about a New York theater performer navigating life, love and his devotion to his art after being diagnosed with AIDS — Malek hesitated at first, because he was fresh from his Oscar-winning portrayal of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody.
Even so, Malek kept felt bthat Sachs “makes unique cinema unlike any other.”
“I knew I was in extraordinary hands, and that if he chose me, I could rely on him,” he said of the “Passages” and “Keep the Lights On” director. “Not only to depend on him, but to elevate it, to push myself, to force myself to race into that fire. I started to discover that these men were similar, but they were also worlds apart.”
Playing Jimmy in The Man I Love would require him to sing on camera again. But those intimate performances weren’t like playing the Queen frontman playing to crowds of thousands in Bohemian Rhapsody.
“We have a legend in Freddie, who really had a destination, whereas Jimmy is just searching for creativity and love and intimacy and joy and pleasure in every moment,” Malek said. “He can sing. Does he sing as well as Freddie? No. If he needs to learn kabuki, he’s going to throw himself into it, and into Onnagata, and I did. Was it ever going to be perfect? Didn’t have to be. It was just about this element of creating and living and joy. New York, in that period, was a very different time.”
While audiences can draw similarities between the two queer men, Malek added, “I see them as two radically different figures—as I have some more distance from it.”
Sachs, who appeared on the press conference dais alongside Malek, his co-stars Tom Sturridge and Luther Ford, offered his take on the comparison.
“I love how you describe Jimmy specifically as someone who does have ambition, but it’s almost internal ambition,” Sachs said. “As opposed to someone like Freddie, who’s looking for external.”
As a character, Jimmy represents a period in 1980s New York and the artists who inhabited it, where “there was courage to do things because they wanted to impress the person who lived next door.”
“There was not this fantasy of globalization. It was a very local time,” Sachs said. “Being as ambitious as someone like Jimmy is, but with the idea of proving things for yourself and for the artist who lives next door to you, just around the corner. This is something which, in a way, gives me a kind of courage, because you need to aim small in a certain way, and you need to aim into yourself.”
Malek added: “There are a lot of people who aspire to be someone like Freddie Mercury, there are a lot of artists in the world who don’t get to that level, but still have an immense abundance of talent and skill, and a world to offer that just maybe is unseen by the masses, but communally gets some recognition. Or they recognize it in themselves. And perhaps that can be almost as gratifying. And I think that was for Jimmy, in a sense.”
The gratification of landing the cover of the Village Voice — as Sachs and Malek believe would be Jimmy’s ultimate goal — is certainly wonderful.
Malek shed a tear during the massive applause and standing ovation for the deeply emotional film, which has been described as a “musical fantasia of a city under duress.”
“With a film like this, you needed someone who had a certain kind of mystery, a certain kind of potential for the unexpected, but also truly a star quality,” he said. “Because there is a whole universe which revolves around Jimmy and Rami in the film. A star is someone who emits light and also asks to be seen.”
During the talk, Malek credited Sachs for bringing out “a performance in me that I don’t think I would give in another situation. “Ira is an actor’s director, among all the other things he can do. We believed in each other.”
The Man I Love is one of the few films in Cannes Festt this ear that is still seeking U.S. distribution.
