THE MAN I LOVE © Jac Martinez
The Man I Love: The Art of Living Life in the Twilight of Life
Seven years after Frankie, played by Isabelle Huppert, Ira Sachs is back In Competition with The Man I Love starring Rami Malek. This film is the culmination his work, as well as of discussions with his co-screenwriter, Maurício Zacharias, with whom he first started working in the late 1980s.
Jimmy George is an iconic figure in New York theatre, but faced with impending death, his desire to live and desire one last time is stronger than everything.
Frankie and The Man I Love are seven years and two films apart, yet both share a common thread – an actor in the twilight of their life. In the first film, a deeply touching drama, Isabelle Huppert invites her family to spend a week in Portugal, knowing that she is dying of cancer.
The character in The Man I Love is facing AIDS and celebrates the present as much he can. In an interview with The Ankler, Ira Sachs tells how he was inspired by Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh (which was in Competition in 1991): “It’s an extraordinary film about the last four months of the artist’s life. Nevertheless, it’s bursting with life, sex, desire, creation, music and dance.” Ira Sachs constructed his film as a “musical fantasy in a city in crisis”.
The plot of The Man I Love unfolds in the late 1980s, a period when Ira Sachs was living in New York, when AIDS was ravaging the lives of the people close to him. He draws on the deeply moving experiences of his close friends and relations at the time, many of whom came from a showbiz background, with the overriding desire to capture those moments of true joy and celebration. The film is a tribute to their memory.
