>>REVIEW
LIE WITH ME
Starring Lauren Lee Smith, Eric Balfour, Don Francks
Directed by Clement Virgo
Opens Friday, December 9
Uptown Screen
"I didn’t know how to love him," our overheated heroine murmurs to herself in a moment of clarity. "I only knew how to fuck – that wasn’t enough." Even so, Lila (Lauren Lee Smith) does her damnedest to hump her way to transcendence in Lie With Me.
Headily sensuous in its depiction of T-dot hipster couplings, Clement Virgo’s film is one of the most sexually explicit features ever made in this straitlaced but secretly pervy country of ours. The director of Rude is on a mission to moisten multiplex seats and create trouser tents with what Paul Rudd might call a grade-A boner jam. (Indeed, the penis of Smith’s co-star, Eric Balfour, gets enough screen time to deserve separate billing.)
For a movie to include so much friction is hardly outré after 9 Songs and Anatomy of Hell. But Lie With Me breaks with the toxic nature of so much art-house smut by showing that Lila’s road to wisdom is at least partially paved with good times. In other words, she enjoys herself. Virgo’s movie is at its best when it conveys her pleasure at both captivating men – like David, the sensitive hunk played by Balfour – and taking what she wants. Set largely in crowded clubs and David’s bedroom, Lie With Me builds up the same claustrophobic yet erotically charged atmosphere as those that informed Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive l’Amour and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged, two of Virgo’s inspirations.
Jettisoning most of the darker undercurrents in the source material – a feverish piece of porn-lit by Tamara Faith Berger, Virgo’s co-screenwriter and romantic partner – Lie With Me is first and foremost a modern romance. The film’s portrait of contemporary mating rituals and its characters’ physical vocabulary are so intriguing, it’s a shame that Lie With Me becomes weighted with subplots and peripheral characters that fill out Lila and David’s lives outside the bedroom. Though Don Francks makes a moving appearance as David’s ailing father, much of this material loads up the lovers with baggage they don’t need to carry. Worse yet, the excess of back story nearly drains Lie With Me of its volatile energy.
But Virgo displays cojones of steel for presenting Lila’s shag odyssey with such frankness and intensity. Smith and Balfour’s courage is equally commendable. And simply seeing a female character who doesn’t get punished for flaunting sexual power is almost more thrilling than any scenes of horizontal action. Go see it with someone you want to undress. |
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