'LIE WITH ME'

FILM REVIEW: LIE WITH ME

Film: ‘Lie With Me’
Year: 2006
Director: Clément Virgo

I was up at 4 am trying to think of a film to watch, when my friend from Canada tweeted about a film called ‘Lie With Me’. Her tweet was a very strange tweet that made me want to watch the movie right away due to one main word she used in it; porn.
I looked it up and decided to watch it on iTunes, and the movie was not quite what I expected.

It didn’t have an elaborate storyline, neither did it have outstanding dialogue or amazing chapters, but what it did have was sex. Loads of it.

The first sex scene is 5 minutes into the movie, with the lead character Leila (Lauren Lee Smith), having a sexual encounter with a guy that she had picked up from a club; outside a club. Literally outside the club, around the back in the darkness. The scene happens to soon to the beginning of the movie that it left me wondering just how many sex scenes I was going to see in this movie, so I decided to get a pen and paper and start to tally them up. Not only how many times she has sex, but how many times she speaks of it, and how many people she has it with.
In this scene where she is so proudly having sex outside a club, there is another couple having sex opposite her in a car. Two couples having sex at the same time in the same scene. Yes ladies and gentlemen, it might as well have been a swingers party porno.

It shows a different perspective of life and how people, especially women in this case, view it. In the olden days, sex was thought to be a sacred gift that you give to the love of your life, but in this movie, sex is, well, sex. Leila doesn’t feel emotionally attached to the people she sleeps with, she just sees it as fun. Some could argue that she has a male’s frame of mind and David, played by Eric Balfour, has a woman’s as he seems emotionally unstable and makes Leila promise to never leave him, whilst he is performing anal sex with her. She has a “you only live once” mentality and feels as if sex, is something that is fun and it should have no sentimental value to anyone.

There is a scene where she is talking to her best friend at a bridal store, as her best friend is getting married in the next week. She is trying on a dress when the best friend tells Leila that she had sex with her ex boyfriend the night before. They make jokes about it and laugh it off, but then Leila asks her a question in which I feel should have been addressed more in the movie “Why would you give up great sex, to get married?”

The movie is based on novella by Tamara Faith Berger, and pushes the boundaries of sex, and almost puts it into a new category of art. The genitalia is not blurred or even hidden, everything is out there and made to be seen by the audience giving it a more shocking appeal. The sex scenes with Leila and David are not rushed or made to look shabby, like the ones with Leila and the guy she meets at the club, these sex scenes are more than just sex, they are explosions of pleasure shown in art form, directed, cut and edited to look real and to feel real to the audience. The second sex scene between Leila and David, is more like a painting bought to life, than any sex scene. The music in the scene, the lighting, the camera angles, everything is perfect and compliments the act of sex so much, that it is not even seen as promiscuous, it is more seen as love. It is a spectacular form of art in more than one way.

Lie with me is a rated 18 movie, about a girl whose desire for sex, lands her in some rough patches, until she meets a guy who is also living the promiscuous lifestyle. They get together, but personal family matters tear them apart, and eventually draw them back together.

The character of Leila is a very bland one. When she is not speaking on the voice-over in her very monotone voice, her face does not give away a lot of her emotions which makes it hard to connect with her, or to feel how she is feeling. She is a very difficult person to feel sorry for.