Jennifer Lawrence Goes Dark

She has been cast in maternal roles since her teens. Now, playing a mother for the first time since becoming one, she has chosen the part of a woman pushed past the edge of sanity. In "Die My Love," Lawrence, as Grace, vibrates with boredom and fury. The novel "Die, My Love," by the Argentinean writer Ariana Harwicz, is narrated by a wife and new mother who is living in rural France and seems to be losing her mind. Motherhood has inserted an immersion blender into her psyche: lust, repulsion, pleasure, and doom swirl into a single mess. She calls herself a "sodomising rodent" with "bullet-wounds for eyes," and thinks, "When I masturbate I desecrate crypts, and when I rock my baby I say amen, and when I smile I unplug an iron lung." One night, standing in the cold, staring at her family through a sliding door, she thinks, "I'll stop trying to draw blood from a stone. I'll contain my madness, I'll use the bathroom. I'll put my baby to sleep, jerk off my man and postpone my rebellion in favor of a better life." Martin Scorsese saw a brief review of the novel in the some years ago and decided to pick up a copy. He found it to be a "powerful mosaic of the mind," he told me recently. Scorsese is a member of a book club of sorts, with a few other filmmakers, who read with an eye toward adaptation. For "Die, My Love," he imagined casting Jennifer Lawrence in the lead. He'd been amazed by her performance in Darren Aronofsky's bewildering 2017 fantasia, "Mother!" In that surreal film--it's like an allegory set inside an oil painting--Lawrence plays a woman living with her poet husband in an old farmhouse, which is gradually, then apocalyptically, invaded by strangers. "She really is feeling everything that's happening, in what appears to be a dream of some kind," Scorsese said. He and Lawrence had discussed adaptations before. They considered "The Awakening," Kate Chopin's 1899 novel of female liberation, which ends with the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, walking into the sea. "Die, My Love" was like "The Awakening" if it began with Edna already underwater.