Big Ed's Placesex, lies, and videotape
I recently mused about how the movie sex, likes, and videotape ended up having a major role in my life (here). I figured I should do a review of it as well, for those who might not have seen it.
sex, lies, and videotape is essentially a video play about those topics, written and directed by Steven Soderbergh. The movie revolves around four characters. Ann (Andie MacDowell) is a tightly wound, almost neurotic, stay-at-home wife. Unknown to her, her husband John (Peter Gallagher) is having an affair with her sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). Then her husband’s college friend Graham (James Spader) rolls into town. Clearly psychologically scarred, Graham admits to an unusual fetish–he can only get off by videotaping women talking about sex and then masturbating to the videos later.
What makes this movie stunning to me is the tightness of the writing. We get great lines of dialogue, like a discussion about how Graham doesn’t want more than one key, or about how Ann thinks sex is overrated. We also get to see these characters as truly three dimensional and watch them unfold and grow or change. Graham is harboring a backstory where he’s hung up on a woman he used to be with, but broke up with years ago. Cynthia reveals, through her body language more than anything, that she’s jealous of her sister. Neither woman quite knows what to think of this new guy, who’s both clearly a pervert (in the “from the way”) sense and also pretty harmless. Meanwhile, John’s lies are clearly for himself as much as they are for his wife and his boss.
For me, the other thing that stuns is the purity of “show, don’t tell.” We don’t get lectures or any long didactic pieces. There are essentially no tropes to remind us this is fiction and not just a voyeuristic look into real peoples’ lives. Yet it’s difficult not to root for Ann and Graham and even Cynthia to straighten things out and have happier lives.
Finally, I love that the movie was heavily about sex, but never sexually explicit. It played with sex as an intellectual and emotional question and not simply rubbing slippery bits together. Such films are all too rare, in my opinion. Besides, it’s this playing that I myself favor in my own writing. Let’s bring it all in sex, and not just the lust.
Five out of five stars.