Ira Sachs‘ drama The Man I Love starring Rami Malek had its world premiere Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received a heartfelt 10-minute ovation following its screening at the Grand Théâtre Lumière.
The film is the second American movie to screen in the festival’s competition section, following James Gray’s Paper Tiger over the weekend.
In The Man I Love, Malek plays New York theater performance artist Jimmy George in late 1980s New York. Jimmy is dying of AIDS as that crisis devastates the city’s artistic community. Despite the prognosis, his desire to live and desire one last time is stronger than everything else. Luther Ford, Tom Sturridge, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Rebecca Hall also star.
Malek, Sturridge and Ford were with Sachs for the screening, along with 100 or so cast, crew and creatives from the pic.
Deadline’s Pete Hammond in his review noted that despite the setting for a movie set just as the AIDS crisis was taking so many young and vibrant lives of artists, Sachs’ film, “instead of focusing on the dark side as so many films and plays have done … celebrates the continuing desire to keep moving, to be unapologetically alive and energized to give all you have left to art.”
The Man I Love is a bookend movie of sorts to Sachs’ 2019 Cannes competition film Frankie, starring Isabelle Huppert about a woman bringing her family together one last time after being diagnosed with cancer. Both were co-written with his longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias.
RELATED: Rami Malek Is An Ailing Artist Determined To Continue Living In Ira Sachs’ Latest ‘The Man I Love’ — First–Look Clip
Sachs lived in NYC during the time period depicted in his latest film.
