SXSW Film Review: Lover, Beloved

When Carson McCullers published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in 1940, the 23-year-old became a beacon for millions of readers who found solace in her thoughtful charting of the interior lives of misfits and outliers in a small Southern town.

McCullers’ work has clearly resonated with Suzanne Vega, whose Lover, Beloved has been a passion project for the singer/songwriter for more than a decade, with early iterations going back to her college days. Vega’s solo concert tribute has coalesced since 2011, with various performances and the release of an album, co-written with Duncan Sheik, 2016’s Lover, Beloved: Songs From an Evening with Carson McCullers.

That evening, thus this film, consists of Vega as McCullers loosely enacting two lectures the author gave: one just after the publication of Hunter, the other months before her death in 1967. The structure provides Vega with the perspective of both anticipation and hindsight, as conveyed in the songs “New York is My Destination” and “Carson’s Last Supper (Agape Love Feast),” the latter a celebration of the transcendence of unconditional love that McCullers and her characters endlessly longed for but never found. Opener “Advice to Young Writers” dashes through a litany of ways to whittle down the complexity of the human condition to mere words before settling on that groan-inducing chestnut, “just write!”

Elsewhere, in “Harper Lee,” Vega has McCullers throwing shade at the To Kill a Mockingbird author for encroaching on her Southern Gothic territory. Between these numbers, Vega, sporting McCullers’ signature pixie haircut and affecting a peculiar cadence, details the writer’s chronic illness, alcoholism, adulterous marriage, and loves unrequited on a handful of minimally decorated sets. Directed with an unobtrusive charm by Austin filmmaker Michael Tully (Don't Leave Home, Ping Pong Summer), Lover, Beloved is an earnest love letter to a literary eccentric uniquely skilled in illuminating the more forlorn regions of that restless four-chambered organ.

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Lover, Beloved

Narrative Spotlight, World Premiere
Wednesday, March 16, 9pm, AFS Cinema
Thursday, March 17, 12:30pm, Paramount
Online: March 15, 9am-March 17, 9am