Lie With Me

We all know that Canadians can't have fun without having a learning experience at the same time. So it comes to pass that this sexed-up extravaganza directed by Rude's Clement Virgo and adapted by Tamara Faith Berger from her own novel can't just deliver the erotic goods. Its promiscuous protag, Leila (Lauren Lee Smith), likes sex all right and she enjoys it anonymously with "no strings attached"; she even refuses to tell current fling David (Eric Balfour) her particulars in an attempt to keep things simple. But of course, nobody in Canada gets it on without being alienated and bad, so the film invents intimacy issues to explain her behaviour and lead her to salvation with a proper loving relationship. This would make the film easy to dismiss were it not for the fact that the sex is pretty damned hot: it's explicit, uninhibited and awash in the hot colours that Canuck efforts never seem to manage, making it undeniably compelling and arousing viewing. It also manages to make good on its emotional commitments, giving personality and obsession to the acts and making them that much more powerful than the average Red Shoe Diary clones. You win some, you lose some though; it's a genuinely potent and sensuous film made better and worse by the moralistic Canadian default position, at once held back by and inconceivable without our national character's most irritating tendencies. All kidding aside, there are plenty of reasons to watch it and the experience is most pleasurable, but the conversations about how it could be improved might be even more gripping than its conspicuously sweaty intrigues. (Th!nk)