Carnal film has female view
Lie With Me’s sensuality drawn from libertine tale published by filmmaker’s wife
Of the three people most involved in making Lie With Me feel like an authentic female take on contemporary dating, only the director, Clement Virgo, is still in a quandary about just what, these days, do women want?
“ Do they still want flowers or candlelight dinners? So women still like flowers — what about the idea of feminism?” the JamaicanVirgo asked, reversing roles during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival. Lie With Me premiered at the festival and now comes to theatres on Nov. 25. You’d think Virgo hadn’t watched his own film, which his wife and collaborator, Tamara Faith Berger, and his leading lady, Lauren Lee Smith, have judged as faithful to contemporary female mores. He doesn’t volunteer whether he courted Berger, due any day now to produce their first child. Virgo does say they became an item before Berger’s Lie With Me, the 122- page novella, barely a book, was published by Toronto’s Gutter Press in 2001.
Quill & Quire
called it “ that rare bird, a novel that aims at combining the trappings of literary fiction with the hardcore vocabulary of the Penthouse letters page.” The tidy volume got passed around, finding its own way like a tattered copy of Story of O. Smith remembers getting a copy from a friend, who got it from her friend. “ I was a big fan,” the Vancouver actress says. “ I felt very empowered by this female character who is so confident in her sexuality.”
Berger says the book sold only about 1,500 copies but reached a lot of women where they lived. Describing her narrator’s modus operandi, Berger says, “ It’s what you do on a first date. You meet someone; you’re attracted to them; you go out and have sex. Well, obviously not every one, but you’re more likely to have sex with someone and then find out what they’re like.” She had been writing stories for porn magazines when she started thinking about developing a “ real” character. Her piece got longer and longer, and Sam Hiyata of Gutter Press was happy to release it as a work of experimental fiction, written mostly in the voice of one anonymous woman. Readers responded to her character’s musings:
“ It was simple at first, because I finally felt what I was doing with my body was right: I had all this longing for sucking the life out of men and now here was a life that I finally wanted.”
Virgo’s immediate reaction to the book was, “Let’s make a movie out of it.” The character gets a name in the movie: Leila. The man she meets at a Toronto club is David. Her dilemma becomes: what do you do when the person you’ve having sex with is someone you could fall in love with? Smith recalls getting a call from her agent on the requirements for the role of Leila, which clearly included not only nudity but on- camera live sex. “ I said, ‘ Are you kidding?’ ” Then she read the script and recognized its origins. Then Virgo, who had directed her in an episode of The L Word, asked her to audition with Eric Balfour ( Six Feet Under), whom he’d interviewed in Los Angeles.
“ I got them into a room and saw the chemistry,” Virgo recalls. “ I knew that without the chemistry we had no movie.” And was there? Really? Smith gives a giddy laugh of affirmation. “There was apparently chemistry.
“ I think why the film probably shocks quite a few people — it’s very easy to film a sex scene, to take off your clothes and go through the motions — is that to watch someone emotionally making love with someone becomes very personal and almost uncomfortable to watch.”
Berger , who has since published The Way of the Whore, believes Virgo was faithful to her work while translating the book into “ his language” of film.
Virgo says he began shooting the film in trepidation, relying on his female collaborators to tell him when he was off base.
It wasn’t the first time the director of Rude, The Planet of Junior Brown
and Love Come Down had gone into the head of a female protagonist, “ but this was raising the bar. The book was so relentlessly, subjectively
female that I felt I
could easily get tripped
up.
“ Men are visual —
that’s why there are so
many strip clubs. They
sit there and look. I
didn’t want to be a voyeur. I wanted to translate what that woman’s feelings were in a very subjective way.”
Virgo says it was veteran Canadian actor Don Francks who pushed him to the place where he could get as close up as he did in the film. The shooting started with a scene in which Francks, as David’s ailing father, gets naked out of the bathtub.
“ I didn’t know how far I was going to go with it myself. Once I saw his bravery, I thought I’ve got to go all the way.”