Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER

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Jennifer Lawrence’s abrasive new film – which she co-produced and stars in – may not reflect her own experience of motherhood, but the choice to take it on was certainly informed by it. Lawrence made the movie about postpartum psychosis with filmmaker Lynne Ramsay between having her two children (she was five months pregnant during filming) and told Cannes press that ‘having children changes everything. It changes your whole life, but it’s brutal and incredible’. The project, she said, ‘deeply moved’ her.

In the film Lawrence plays Grace, a young woman who moves into an isolated Montana farmhouse with her boyfriend Jackson (Robert Pattinson), where she falls pregnant. When the baby arrives Grace is locked in a rinse-and-repeat pattern of feeding and changing while Jackson goes off the work, her writing ambition stalled and her grip on reality growing tenuous. Filled with rage, frustration and the need to be seen as a sexual being and not just a mother, Grace becomes erratic and violent, confounding her partner and his recently widowed mother (Sissy Spacek). Conjuring a sexual fantasy with a mysterious biker (LaKeith Stanfield) and desperate to feel something – pain, orgasm, passion – other than the numbness of a mothering routine, she wants to set her world alight. As the end credits song (performed by Ramsay) attests, ‘Love will tear us apart’… 

Though Grace finds motherhood opens her up to self-destruction and chaos, Lawrence says that her children have helped her access more of herself as an actor. ‘I didn’t know that I could feel so much, and my job has a lot to do with emotion, and they’ve opened up the world to me. It’s almost like a blister or something, so sensitive. So they’ve changed my life, obviously, for the best, and they’ve changed me creatively. I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.’

The film is certainly something of a tour de force for Lawrence who spits, fights, claws and crawls through the role like a feral creature, Grace’s fantasies overlapping and pushing against her reality. It is a fever-dream representation of the confusion, fear and delirium of post-partum depression and psychosis which the actor admitted was a terrifying condition for any woman to experience. ‘There’s not really anything like postpartum… it’s extremely isolating. The truth is extreme anxiety and extreme depression is isolating no matter where you are. You feel like an alien.’

The film premiered to a nine-minute ovation in Cannes and looks to be another role that could net Lawrence awards buzz. The actor attended wearing custom Dior, an updated version of a 1949 Poulenc gown inspired by fans, and was photographed by Greg Williams in a rooftop suite of the Carlton Hotel overlooking the Croisette.