Lie with Me: Girls just wanna have fun

DIRECTED BY Clement Virgo, 2006

STARRING Lauren Lee Smith (Leila), Eric Balfour (David)
CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex, nudity and language
RUN TIME 89 mins approx, Metrodome

COVER QUOTE 'The continuing evolution of art porn' - Hollywood Reporter

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT In the last decade or so, hardcore porn has tried to extend its market by being more female friendly. In a mirroring of that situation, the artcore movie market is trying something similar with films like this.

THE PLOT At a party, Leila shares a bathroom with a guy, David, but ends up pulling someone else, with whom she has sex while David and his on-off girlfriend, Victoria, watch from a parked car, where they, in turn, have sex. Leila becomes obsessed with David; she exposes herself to him and then goes to his flat, where they have sex. They start to date but Leila's anxiety over the break-up of her parents' marriage, and the presence of Victoria, cause problems.

Leila flirts with other men at a club provoking David's jealousy; when they get home he sodomises her. David is then affected by the death of his father, for whom he acted as carer. David and Leila's relationship deteriorates; she has sex with someone else but is unfulfilled. When David sees Leila going to her cousin's wedding, he follows her and is invited to join the party.

THE FILM Lie with Me opens with a close-up of a woman's mouth; as the camera pulls further and further back, the main woman character, Leila, is revealed, pointing a TV remote control and only dressed in a short jean skirt, under which she's wanking herself. It's an absorbing image that doesn't quite succeed in its execution, much like this whole film.

Everyone in Lie with Me is annoying; it looks like a fashion spread, too, filmed in accentuated colours. Sex takes place on artfully arranged rugs; David's room has prints hanging on lines from the ceiling and a L'Atalante film poster on the wall (perhaps a visual pun on the respective directors' names?); when Leila comes to his place, she finds David posed on his bed in the middle of the room, reading Steppenwolf, as drapes blow in the sunlight behind him. If Cosmo did porn films, the result would be something like this (there are lots of condoms everywhere, too).

Scarlet magazine is quoted on the DVD cover saying that Lie with Me is 'everything 9 Songs wanted to be', a dreadful slur on the latter film, which is braver and more interesting in every way. The only area where this film goes further is that the couple at its centre have anal sex but, considering the detail in 9 Songs, you'd hardly expect it to go that far. For all Lie with Me's bluster about a woman trying to act like a man to get what she wants sexually, the anal sex scene is one of subjugation.

This DVD proudly proclaims that it is the 'full uncut UK version' - in BLOCK CAPITALS - but I can't find any record of it having been threatened with cuts in the UK, nor is the BBFC warning as explicit as some (no mention of 'real sex', for instance). The implication is that you're seeing something not afforded to cinemagoers (elsewhere in the world), though I don't think it had a full theatrical release here.

Leila's cousin, who's about to get married, wonders whether it's worth giving up great sex - with an ex - for love, with her fiancé; when David asks Leila whether they should go on a date, Leila replies that she's never been on one. Unfairly, she also asks David whether he has a girlfriend when she has his cock in his mouth, which may explain some of the confusion that ensues over their relationship status.

Lauren Lee Smith is very attractive as redhead Leila, even though the character's banal thoughts and fantasies, presented in voiceover, may want to make you kill yourself: 'Men can do whatever they want... they're not afraid'; 'How do you have sex with someone you're in love with?' Another mantra is 'Don't come'; I don't know how sexy that is.

If that doesn't do it for you, Eric Balfour will, and not in a good way. A desperately drippy presence, it's a relief that he doesn't voice his thoughts in his hopeless, girly voice. One sex scene is dominated by his ridiculous moustache, which is as neatly trimmed as Leila's pubic hair in another. David is supposed to have some depth, presumably, because he cares for his coarse father, though he could simply be under his thumb (David's girlfriend warns Leila, however: 'He has intimacy issues, he needs a mummy'). When Leila flirts and dances with two other men at a club, they appear even gayer than David.

Leila seems to find David as annoying as we do and it's something of a relief when they split up, when his father has died. The couple's superficial beauty is contrasted with the frail flesh of the father, who we see as much of naked as his son. (Leila only speaks with her own father on the phone when she's naked having a bath, which suggests she has issues all of her own.) She fails to deal with the idea that her parents are splitting up and selling the family home.

Lie with Me, which is based on a book by Tamara Berger, believes there is a desperate sexual connection at the heart of David and Leila's relationship, but Henry Miller or Anais Nin they ain't. If we relied on this level of heat in tempestuous couples, the world of art and literature would be a very sorry place. At the end of the film, David makes up with Leila. He admits, rather like 9 Songs' Matt, that he doesn't know where she lives, and perhaps they should get to know each other better. Considering he doesn't seem to have any personality, that would surely be the nail in the coffin for any prospective relationship.

KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 6:21 Leila blows a geeky guy outside a party; David and his girlfriend watch from a parked car. David's girlfriend goes down on him while Leila turns to face the car to have sex. David's girlfriend gets on top of him and Leila and David mimic each other's gestures while having sex with their respective partners.

Chapter 1, 14:25 Leila and David hide in a playground where he crawls into a large concrete tube. Leila follows him and undoes her dress to expose her left breast. When she touches herself, David puts his hand on his crotch but then leaves.

Chapter 2, 21:01 Leila goes to David's flat and starts to suck him off, then they have sex on the floor.

Chapter 7, 1:08:59 Leila picks up the geeky guy and goes back to his place; she forces his face into her crotch, then mounts him on the sofa.

Chapter 7, 1:11:28 Leila desperately tries to wank herself to orgasm while watching a porn film at home.

FURTHER VIEWING Lauren Lee Smith's performance stands alongside those of a couple of other strong women leads in two other recent movies: Kelly Reilly in Puffball (2007) and Elisabeth Röhm in Bernard Rose's The Kreutzer Sonata.

Puffball is the ageing Nicolas Roeg's perhaps valedictory piece, based on a Fay Weldon novel and scripted by her son, Dan. It features some extraordinary sex scenes - not necessarily in a good way, as they include internal shots of ejaculation. The Kreutzer Sonata (2008) shares with Lie with Me the belief that its central characters - Röhm plays alongside the mealy mouthed Danny Huston - are bound in a ferocious sexual tie. Reilly and Röhm are very watchable, though neither film does them any favours.

KEY QUOTE 'I know how to fuck and get what I want' - Leila

Irreversible: Back to hell

DIRECTED BY Gaspar Noé, 2002
STARRING Monica Bellucci (Alex), Vincent Cassell (Marcus), Albert Dupontel (Pierre)
CERTIFICATION 18: Contains very strong violence, sexual violence, sex and language
RUN TIME 97 mins approx, Tartan
LANGUAGE French

COVER QUOTE 'One of the most important films in the last 20 years of movie history' - Dazed & Confused

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT It's told in reverse. It stars Monica Bellucci. She gets anally raped. Oh.

THE PLOT Irreversible begins with its end credits, rolling down the screen before they skew to the side.

1. Blue lights flash on the outside wall of a building and the camera flies into a room where Philippe Nahon, the butcher from Noé's Seul contre tous (1998), is sitting naked on a bed. He's regaling another man with his crime: 'I slept with my daughter. She was so cute.'

2. They're distracted by sirens arriving at the club downstairs which, we're told, is called the Rectum. A man, Marcus, is wheeled out on a stretcher, his shoulder strapped up. Another man, Pierre, comes out with the police; he's told he'll likely get 10 years in jail for what he did.

3. Marcus and Pierre enter 'felching fuck club' the Rectum looking for a man called Tenia, a type of tapeworm. Various acts are being performed in the club, including blow jobs, beatings, anal sex and fisting, which the two men are asked to participate in. Marcus finds someone who may be Tenia and attacks him with a bottle; Tenia throws Marcus to the ground and breaks his arm. Pierre grabs a fire extinguisher and beats Tenia's head to pulp.

4. Marcus is driving a taxi to the area where the Rectum is supposed to be; when Pierre tries to leave in the cab, Marcus smashes the car's windows. Pierre is screaming insults at Marcus, saying he must think of Alex in hospital.

5. Marcus throws a cab driver out of his taxi.

6. Pierre and Marcus are interrogating prostitutes in the company of two hoods; Marcus attacks a transsexual prostitute who admits he saw what happened: the man they want is called Tenia, and can be found in the Rectum.

7. Pierre is in a daze in the back of a police van, being interrogated. In the street he and Marcus are accosted by two local gangsters who say they will help them get revenge.

8. Coming out of an apartment block, Pierre and Marcus see a woman, Alex, being lifted into an ambulance on a stretcher. Her face is a bloody mess.

9. Alex exits the apartment block and tries to hail a taxi; she's advised to use the underpass to cross the road. It's here she is raped in a drawn-out scene, described below.

10. Marcus is making fun of Pierre at the party; with two women they go into a bathroom, where Marcus takes some coke and kisses the women. Alex is with a pregnant woman friend, telling her it's a special day. Marcus is obviously off his face and Alex tells him she wants to leave.

11. It becomes clear Pierre is Alex's ex; on the way to the party, on the Metro with Alex and Marcus, Pierre tries to get the couple to describe their sex life.

12. Alex and Marcus are shown in bed; Alex tells Marcus she dreamt of a red tunnel split in two. She tells Marcus her period is late but he says he would be pleased if she was pregnant. They play around together (Marcus puts Etienne Daho's cover of Edith Piaf's Mon manège à moi on the stereo) and Marcus tells Alex he wants to fuck her arse. He goes to buy a bottle before the party, she takes a shower and then a pregnancy test. Her reaction implies it is positive.

13. The final scene shows her lying in the gardens outside the flat, where children are playing in a sprinkler's spray.

THE FILM Despite a grudging admiration for Seul contre tous, I avoided Irreversible when it first came out in the cinema. I succumbed to review a special DVD edition for Little White Lies magazine but continue to be perplexed by the popularity of this movie: why would you want it in your home?

Irreversible answers a simple question: how do you end a rape drama on a happy note? Tell it backwards. Noé is a virtuoso technician and Irreversible shows off his talents to their full, though the film is not exactly backwards, rather its scenes are shown in reverse order. How seriously, though, do you take a film involving a search for a character named after a tapeworm in a place called the Rectum?

The film's politics are defiantly unreconstructed: 'Blood calls for vengeance,' two gangsters say. 'This is a man's business.' Sam Peckinpah examines a man's quest for revenge when the character's wife is raped in Straw Dogs (1971); Noé's associates Despentes and Trinh Thi posit an equally bloody female response in Baise-Moi.

Here, it is Pierre who boils over and smashes Tenia's head to pieces. Pierre has tried to hold Marcus back: Marcus goads Pierre over his apparently asexual life since Alex left him - is he gay? Homophobia is rife throughout the film; when we do see gay men, in the Rectum, they are extreme caricatures (none tries to stop Pierre killing Tenia, there is even some applause).

To Pierre, Marcus is an animal; this, it turns out, is why Alex is drawn to the latter. Pierre could be a typically neurotic, if uncharacteristically explicit, Woody Allen character; he tells a self-deprecating story how the one time Alex cried out during sex she had banged her head on some furniture. When Pierre quizzes the couple on their sex life, Alex says Pierre was too considerate with her, an altruist, she wants a man who takes his pleasure with her (as, Noé could be saying, the rapist does).

Tenia, Alex's rapist, is encountered with a transsexual; during his assault Tenia makes clear that he wouldn't normally fuck a woman. He berates Alex for being rich - she has dressed up for the party - and punishes her for being beautiful. (We have no idea what she or Marcus does, though Pierre is mocked for being a philosophy teacher, whether literally or not is unclear.)

If the film's moral is stated at the end - ie the beginning - it perhaps lies in Nahon's butcher's philosophy: 'Gotta fight, gotta live. Go on fighting, go on living.' At the beginning - the end - Noé underlines the possibility of Alex's pregnancy by twice showing a poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey featuring a floating foetus. The film closes with a scene of picture-perfect tranquility. It is said Noé used a 27 hertz tone in the film's soundtrack to induce nausea in viewers (the score is by Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter). At the end, you may well feel sick.

KEY SCENE Chapter 10, 42:54 Alex walks down the underpass and sees a couple fighting. The man beats the woman and, when Alex passes, he grabs her. He pulls a knife on her and forces her to the ground. He holds her mouth shut and anally rapes her while all the time spouting threats and obscenities. (In case we don't get the point, Noé added a CGI penis to the assailant in post-production.) The scene lasts some time; when he finishes Alex tries to crawl away but he begins to kick her head. He then grabs her, punches her many times and pummels her face into the ground.

FURTHER VIEWING Noé's new film, Enter the Void, opens this Friday, 24 September, and includes a sex scene from inside the vagina, reminiscent of Nic Roeg's dire Puffball (2007). Noé is said to be working on an 'erotic love' movie next.

THE QUOTE 'Time destroys everything' - End caption

BONUS CURIO Noé collects posters for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is presumably where the image used near the end of Irreversible comes from.