This is "Love Me Like You Hate Me", a ten-minute live action short film from 2020, October 2020 to be precise, so the outcome here is only three months old now. The director is award-winning filmmaker Luke Turner and he has worked with actor Shia LaBeouf on several occasions in the past. You can check out his body of work if you care what they collaborated on. Many hashtags included. No surprise anyway that LaBeauf also plays the male protagonist in this mix of movie and music video. The song we were listening to by the way did not really do a lot for me, so I will not elaborate on it any further. It wasn'd bad either though, but I doubt it will still be in my ears and head a few days from now. Probably almost nothing from this one will be. The female part here is played by Emmy-nominated actress Margaret Qualley. A bit of an unlucky name as the word "Qualle" in German means jellyfish. She is nothing like that though. Very stunning young woman. The fact that you see literally everything from her body at the very start, but also later on, may be the reason why this is too explicit for Youtube. Go to Vimeo. Intercourse is also implied and we see LaBeauf constantly naked too, even if they did his best to hide his genital. The scene on the bed is okay and the shower scene is also pretty nice. Cannot lie there as a heterosexual male.
By the way, they used a split screen here for this one. One half on top, the other below. I did not like this creative choice very much, but I can see why it's vital for the tale with the acting in the top half basically being right there where it was at the start in the bottom half. And is again in the end for the bottom half as well, namely with the two lying on bed together having sex. Between this identical opening and closure, there is a lot more action and movement going on though. This is again where the music video component comes into play. It is all choreographed and the arguments the characters are having are displayed in an exaggerated form that feels like from a stage play or ballet performance. So there we have another parallel to what LaBeouf did in this video with Maddie Ziegler (and Sia). Cannot lie that I like that one a little more than this one here. But who knows, maybe this one will also grow with time, even if I doubt it a bit. The one thing that cannot be said here is that the protagonists took a nice risk here. Shia continues his path of slightly unusual, but inspired career choices, while Qualley went fully naked down to her pubes here, which is always a bold move for any actress. But then again, let's be honest here: She 100% has the body for that.
Now I see Labeauf and Qualley were a couple at one point, most likely also when this got made. This may explain it and I wonder if they ended up together before or after this one. Okay, that is all then. It's a tolerable watch at times, but overall it could not win me over, which had least as much to do with the song where the lyrics feel a bit empty to me as well as with the slightly pretentious video. I am glad it was this short. Thumbs down. Not recommended, even if was a by no means a bad watch. Just not good enough.
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