Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: LOVE ME [Sundance Film Festival 2024 - Park City, Utah]
The aspect of existence is wrenched in a context of both you and me. You can exist but it depends on someone like me or you or vice versa to give perhaps perspective on what it means to actually be. "Love Me" [US Dramatic Competition] takes a buoy and a satellite after the apocalypse trying to figure out who they are and how to exist. Satellite is simply there as a store of information for a civilization gone and decimated for whatever reason. Buoy is settling in the ocean right off Manhattan just bobbing along looking for connection. Buoy learns to speak from hearing Satellite above in orbit and accesses the internet archives. After skirting through videos, Buoy finds Deja and her boyfriend. Deja is played by Kristen Stewart and her boyfriend is played by Steven Yeun. Blending computer animation (a little clunky but it is an independent) and eventually an avatar space, they take on figures of what it is like to live a life. Buoy becomes Me (aka Deja) and Satellite becomes Iam (aka her boyfriend). It keys into ideas of who we believe ourselves to be, how we act and how we look. Iam tries to engage but doesn't understand the necessity, not until Me somewhat leaves and is gone.
Time is relative here to a billion years but the story transforms also to the point where the fake world looks as real as the real world. Time allows people to think. For others it passes in an instant without a certain rhyme or reason. When they reconnect, the film is live action but within the same construct but the mileau and how the characters see themselves is what is very dynamic. These are two characters not human but trying to process how they are and what they decided to be this way. This is the first time in a while Stewart has played a primarily cis character where she is engaging romantically with a man and it as always is an eye opener how exceptional an actress she can be in something more conventional. I understand she takes certain roles that appeal to her but this film feels very sweet despite its nihilistic understones. There is obviously a feel or even a homage on the periphery to the beginning of "Wall-E". The ending of the film here is overtly dramatic but makes sense since these are intelligences trying to recitify what they know of life against humanity when their understanding is less than complete. Their interaction with water and ice cream is giddy...and the eventual idea of what intimacy and sex is in a world that doesn't exist is an interesting construct. "Love Me" is an interesting experiment of a movie, both touching and disconnected but also quite sweet and lonely in certain way, even as the light that you and iam see fades in the distance, they still...for a time...might still have each other. A-
By Tim Wassberg
