SCREEN | Clara and Ewan McGregor Drive Past 'Bleeding Love'

"I could never keep up with you."

Vertical Entertainment / Sobini Films

Bleeding Love (formerly titled You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder) unites actress Clara McGregor, a producer on the film who also shares a story credit, and her famous actor father, Ewan McGregor, in a family road trip drama about addiction trauma from sophomore director Emma Westenberg.

Very loosely inspired by the experiences of the actual McGregor family's real-life tensions after Ewan divorced Clara's mother and the two subsequently became estranged alongside her own battle with substance abuse, the therapeutic film mines those sentiments in the deliberately unnamed characters of the troubled daughter and absentee father played by the duo, the former as a college dropout artist who recently overdosed and the latter as a recovering alcoholic starting over with a new family.

Despite the closeness of the performances' obvious familiarity, the younger McGregor's detached defiance conflicts with the elder's easygoing weariness. Scripted by Ruby Caster from a story by her, Vera Bulder (also a producer, who appears memorably as the nicest sex worker ever), and Clara, Bleeding Love slowly reveals its backstory before sharing the pain and regret of characters' family ties.

Filmed vividly through close-ups and focused on pastel colours of scenic deserted landscapes of the bountiful American Southwest, Westenberg frames the two-hander as a contrast of generations at opposite ends of the same problem of substance abuse and addiction to cope with lingering family trauma. Through the wide open spaces of the road, we see the father/daughter bond reluctantly build as the pair belt out the titular pop ballad sung by British singer Leona Lewis, as you might expect.

Bleeding Love will be available to stream on various digital platforms and through video on demand starting February 16th.


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