The Man I Love: Ira Sachs struggles beneath the weight of queer cinematic history

Few cinematic subjects carry as much emotional and historical weight as AIDS narratives.

Every new film entering that territory inevitably confronts the legacy of decades of queer cinema shaped by illness, grief and survival.

With The Man I Love, premiering in competition at Cannes 2026, Ira Sachs deliberately steps into that tradition.

The result is emotionally sincere, occasionally moving — and ultimately frustrating.

The film follows Jimmy, a young queer artist already in the advanced stages of AIDS-related illness.

From the opening scenes, Sachs establishes a body collapsing from within.

Jimmy moves like someone caught between youth and disappearance.

Tom Sturridge delivers the film’s strongest performance by embracing restraint rather than spectacle.

He doesn’t “perform” suffering in obvious ways.

Instead, exhaustion seems permanently embedded in his physicality.

His gestures feel incomplete.

His silences grow heavier scene after scene.

Around him, the film explores how the certainty of death distorts everyone else’s behavior.

Friends become overly protective.

Lovers become obsessive.

Devotion turns suffocating.

In theory, this emotional environment should generate enormous dramatic tension.

But Sachs repeatedly undermines that tension through surprisingly heavy-handed filmmaking choices.

The biggest issue is the score.

The movie relies almost constantly on dramatic classical music and operatic vocals to force emotional intensity.

Rather than trusting stillness, Sachs continuously amplifies scenes through overwhelming sound design.

Moments that should feel intimate become emotionally over-signaled.

The film seems terrified of silence.

That insecurity becomes increasingly visible as the narrative progresses.

What makes this particularly disappointing is that The Man I Love initially hints at a far more interesting approach.

For a while, Jimmy’s illness remains mostly offscreen.

AIDS exists through absence, through reactions, through atmosphere.

The disease silently contaminates the emotional space around the character without being visually centered.

Those early scenes carry genuine unease.

But Sachs eventually abandons that subtlety and returns to far more familiar territory: hospitals, medical decline, visible suffering.

At that point, the movie begins to feel trapped inside established queer melodrama conventions.

And that’s the core problem.

The film constantly recalls better works without ever surpassing them.

The AIDS sequences inevitably invite comparisons to Robin Campillo’s BPM (120 Beats Per Minute), whose political urgency and emotional precision remain unmatched.

Likewise, the dying artist narrative echoes All That Jazz, though without Bob Fosse’s extraordinary formal inventiveness.

Rami Malek’s performance only intensifies the imbalance.

Where Sturridge internalizes pain, Malek externalizes everything.

His acting often feels overly demonstrative — grimaces, emotional outbursts, visible desperation.

At times, the film slips dangerously close to television melodrama.

And yet, despite all these flaws, the movie never feels cynical.

Sachs genuinely cares about these characters.

There’s real compassion in the way he films queer vulnerability and emotional collapse.

Some late scenes achieve heartbreaking honesty precisely because the film finally stops trying so hard.

In those moments, silence returns.

Bodies simply exist together.

And suddenly the movie becomes human again.

Ultimately, The Man I Love feels less like a failed film than an exhausted one.

It remains haunted by decades of queer cinematic tragedy without fully discovering what new perspective it wants to add.

That exhaustion becomes the film’s defining emotional texture.

Not only the exhaustion of illness.

But the exhaustion of repeating the same cinematic grief over and over again.

Copyright © 2026 IMPACT EUROPEAN

 

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