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LIE WITH ME  

Directed by: Clement Virgo
Written by: Tamara Faith Berger, Clement Virgo
Starring: Lauren Lee Smith, Eric Balfour, Polly Shannon, Don Franks, Ron White, Kate Lynch.
Country: Canada

One condom           

Reviewed by Hal Gray

Taboo Breaking, Not! 

There’s nothing more pretentious than a Canadian art house flick where people take off their clothes and make a statement about fucking. We saw a spate of them in the ‘60s (Jackie Burroughs wherefore art thou?!) and the odd one or two have appeared per decade through the next 30 years. Clement Virgo’s Lie With Me gets his dibs in for the new millennium.

Worse, Virgo’s promo material touts this film as ‘a distaff version of Last Tango in Paris'. It’s not even close. In part Lie With Me is seen from the sexual persona of a young woman, but Tango, fascinating and terrible in its own right, is not about a male’s bedroom analysis of love and sex. It’s about mortality and the fear that strikes us when we approach it.

Lie With Me purports to be about the love/sex debate in taboo-breaking fashion. Well, there aren’t any more taboos and Clement’s depiction of a horny young woman’s journey into a meaningful relationship doesn’t add much to the subject. In fact, you might have to read a festival film guide or two to find out what the film really is about. It’s not there on the screen.

Part of the problem is the V.O. of Leila, the heroine. We hear her interior monologue, but it sounds more like the screenwriters trying to say something than what we get from Leila’s portrayal on the screen. And when you think about the ‘wisdom’ of the V.O.s for a moment, they were most often trite or confusing.

Lauren Lee Smith plays Leila, a promiscuous girl. I use the term ‘girl’ advisedly as in many scenes she looks thirteen except in those when she looks fourteen. She’s as comfortable blowing a complete stranger out behind the nightclub as she is in riding her classic one-speed Schwinn-like bike through the park. The object of her desire/love—you chose—David (Eric Balfour), is a more responsible citizen, except when Leila is oozing pheromones. He a male of the species after all and not too bright.

Smith and Balfour do quite well on their own or with other actors, but don’t muster up much chemistry together. Of course they’re fighting that age-old problem with soft-core porn. Are they or aren’t they really doing it? pulls the viewer out of the moment.

Lie With Me is not a complete loss. There is a dominance theme with Leila’s sexuality that could have been really interesting, but sometimes it’s there and sometimes not. And they’re religious about using condoms, and don’t smoke. But overall, pretty sophomoric stuff.

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