Lie With Me

Lie With Me
Directed by: Directed by Clément Virgo
(Thinkfilm)
This is the new film by Virgo, director of Rude and The Planet of Junior Brown, based on a novel by his wife, Tamara Berger (she also wrote the screenplay) and filmed in Toronto. Lie with Me premiered at the Atlantic Film Festival, but we shouldn’t be surprised it didn’t get a theatrical release. If you haven’t heard the buzz, this is the most sexually provocative Canadian film since Crash (not the Oscar winner but the auto-erotica one, by David Cronenberg); it’s also been called honest and realistic. The good news is that this picture might actually turn you on as it follows Leila (Vancouverite Lauren Lee Smith) hitting the mid-summer club scene in Toronto. It’s the story of a young, promiscuous woman, who, while being naive in many ways, relates to the world through sex. She meets someone she really cares about, David (Eric Balfour, Claire’s badass boyfriend from Six Feet Under) and in trying to sustain some sort of relationship she’s forced to mature, suddenly and painfully. The plotting is a bit episodic and the story does get a little lost in all the sex scenery, but it’s great to see a Canadian movie so frank and unselfconscious. The French are going to love it.
—Carsten Knox