With The Man I Love, Ira Sachs transforms New York at the height of the AIDS crisis into a space suspended between desire, fragility, and the desperate need to keep living even as the body begins to fade.
At Cannes, noise often arrives before emotion. Films are discussed as contenders, strategic moves, or potential prize winners long before they are actually seen. But with The Man I Love, something different began to happen from the very first private screenings. Conversations surrounding Ira Sachs’ latest feature were not focused solely on the Official Competition or the American director’s return to the Croisette after several years away. There was another feeling circulating through the festival corridors: the sense that this was a profoundly intimate work, shaped more by emotional memory than historical reconstruction.
Perhaps that is why the experience of watching The Man I Love ultimately feels less like a film about AIDS than a film about time itself. About the desire to continue inhabiting the body, love, and art even when death begins to draw uncomfortably close.
Premiering in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, The Man I Love unfolds in late-1980s New York, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Jimmy George—played by a remarkably restrained and vulnerable Rami Malek—is a celebrated figure in the downtown theater scene, attempting to sustain both his artistic life and emotional relationships as his health begins an irreversible decline. Yet Sachs carefully avoids the familiar mechanisms of the medical melodrama. He is not interested in filming illness as emotional spectacle. He is interested in filming the life that insists on existing around it.
And that choice transforms the entire film.
From its opening frames, The Man I Love breathes with a melancholy that is at once luminous and painful. Josée Deshaies’ cinematography embraces saturated colors, warm interiors, and nocturnal light that seems to envelop the characters within a city permanently suspended between celebration and mourning. New York appears less as a backdrop than as an emotional condition—a place where art, sex, music, and death coexisted within the same rooms.
Sachs understands something fundamental about that historical moment: even amid devastation, there remained an intensity of life that is difficult to comprehend from a contemporary distance. That is why the film never slips into solemnity. There is music. There is desire. There is dancing. There are absurdly ordinary conversations in cramped apartments while fear lingers just beyond the frame. Tragedy does not erase life; it makes it more urgent.
That sensibility permeates every aspect of the film.
Jimmy George is not portrayed as a martyr or a political symbol. He is a man trying to continue desiring. And in that space, Rami Malek delivers what may well be the most delicate and emotionally precise performance of his career since Mr. Robot. For years, the actor often seemed confined to roles built around performative eccentricity. Here, the opposite occurs. Sachs films him through physical fragility, through pauses, through a gaze constantly shadowed by emotions that remain just beyond articulation.
On the Croisette, many post-premiere conversations centered precisely on that performance. Some critics described it as a reinvention; others suggested it was the first time Malek appeared truly comfortable within his own silence. Even the emotional response following the screening—a particularly long standing ovation and visible emotion from the actor inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière—became part of the festival narrative.
Yet reducing the film to a single performance would be unfair.
Because The Man I Love also functions as a deeply personal reflection on queer memory and cinematic representation. Sachs, who lived in New York during those years, builds the film from intimate experiences, lost friendships, and emotional memories tied to the downtown artistic community of the 1980s. That autobiographical connection is constantly felt on screen. The film never seems to be recreating the past. It feels as though it is remembering it.
Even the musical dimension—subtle yet essential throughout—operates according to that emotional logic. Songs emerge as refuge, as an alternative language of affection, as moments when characters can express what words are no longer capable of sustaining. The performance of “The Man I Love,” the Gershwin standard that gives the film its title, acquires devastating resonance precisely because the film understands love not as an idealized romantic promise, but as a desperate human necessity in the face of time’s fragility.
And perhaps that is where the true power of Sachs’ cinema resides.
Unlike much contemporary filmmaking about the AIDS crisis—often structured around historical pedagogy or explicit trauma—The Man I Love embraces a far more intimate and sensory perspective. Sachs seems less interested in explaining history than in asking how an era shaped simultaneously by desire and fear is remembered emotionally. How does one film the proximity of death without allowing that proximity to consume the experience of being alive?
The film answers by observing bodies. Glances. Dances. Smoke-filled apartments and conversations that seem destined to end too soon. There are scenes in which time slows to the point of becoming almost tangible. Others where music occupies the emotional space that the characters themselves can no longer fully inhabit.
At Cannes, where many contemporary films appear engineered to generate immediate discourse, The Man I Love operates from a different sensibility altogether. More vulnerable. More physical. More human. Sachs does not seek to transform queer suffering into moral spectacle or tragic iconography. He films people trying to preserve moments of beauty within a historically devastating reality.
And that makes the film all the more heartbreaking.
Because as viewers watch Jimmy dance, fall in love, or sing, they understand exactly what is coming. The film understands it too. Yet it repeatedly refuses to allow death to monopolize the emotional experience of its characters.
Perhaps that is why The Man I Love lingered across the Croisette long after its premiere. Not merely as one of the most discussed films in Competition, but as a work that reminds us of something essential about cinema and memory: that even the darkest eras were filled with people trying to love while everything around them was beginning to disappear.
And perhaps that was always the true act of resistance.
To keep dancing.