Film Review: "Lie with Me" (2022)

Olivier Peyon's new film is a powerful and beautiful at loss, love, and the power of writing.

If there’s one kind of film that’s guaranteed to hit me right in the feels, it’s a gay one that focuses on first love, whether it is consummated or whether it hangs over the present. In Lie with Me (original French title Arrête avec tes mensonges), both elements of first love are in play. Richly shot and evocatively told, director Olivier Peyon has given us a film which forces us to reckon with the power of memory and loss to change out lives for both the better and for the worse. 

The action of Lie with Me takes place in two distinct time periods. In the present, enormously successful novelist Stéphane returns to his small town at the invitation of a local distillery. While there, he meets Lucas Andreiu, the son of his friend Thomas. As it turns out, however, Stéphane’s relationship with Thomas was far more intimate than he lets on to his young acquaintance; in fact, they were lovers. As the film unfolds, both Stéphane and Lucas have to contend with the past and, in particular, with Thomas’s presence and absence in both of their lives. Stéphane’s flashbacks constitute the other temporal plane of the film, as his return to his hometown means he must reckon with both Thomas’s death and with his former lover’s enduring influence on him. While they had promised to meet after Thomas spent a summer in Spain, he never returned, and Stéphane’s life, and his entire career, have been built off of that sundering moment.

From the beginning, it’s clear that there is a potent and visceral physical chemistry between the young Stéphane and Thomas, and their amorous sexual encounter in an abandoned swimming pool is somehow both awkward and deeply sensual. For both young men, this is a moment in which they can be their most true selves, all of the angst and difficulties of adolescence stripped away so that the only thing left is their budding desire for one another. Time and again throughout the flashback we see the two of them making love, their bodies intertwined. What begins as a fervent and hurried escapade away from the eyes of others becomes something more intimate, and more emotionally complicated, when Thomas starts visiting Stéphane’s house while the latter’s parents are away.  

Indeed, it soon becomes clear that Thomas, for all that he clearly harbors deep feelings for Stéphane, also can’t quite overcome his shame at his desire for other men. When, for example, Stéphane comes to his farm to see him, he responds with something dangerously akin to violence, seeing his lover’s interloping as a danger to his jealously guarded, and deeply closeted, existence. Both Jérémy Gillet and Julien De Saint Jean, who play the young men, allow us to feel how each of them chafes at the boundaries that have been placed around them, whether by society at large or by their own tormented psyches. In these flashback scenes, one gets the sense that Stéphane at least would like to live his life more openly, but his genuine love for Thomas keeps him from pressing the issue. 

Just as the shadow of the closet hangs over the past, so it also has an impact on the present. After Stéphane meets the young Lucas, the two engage in some lighthearted talk, but it becomes increasingly clear that they are each trying to get something out of the other. For Stéphane, this young man seems to provide him an opportunity to make peace with both Thomas’ death and the fact that he was never able to say goodbye. For Lucas, however, things are far more complicated, for connecting with the man he has long suspected of being his father’s lover is not nearly as illuminating as he had hoped. Slowly but surely, however, the two manage to make peace, both with one another and with the suicide of the man who was so central to both of their lives.

In a lesser film, Thomas’ death–which fortunately takes place off-screen–would look suspiciously like the “bury your gays” trope that continues to haunt so much of popular culture. In Lie with Me, however, Thomas’s death is instead a haunting reminder of the pernicious power of the closet, of how a secret sense of shame can poison and destroy a life and a soul. For a man like Thomas, it isn’t even possible that he could live his life openly. While it’s never stated explicitly, it seems more likely than not that he chose to take his own life because he simply couldn’t live with the shame of being a man who loves other men. 

What is more clear, however, is why he never returned from Spain and reconnected with his young love. As Stéphane reads a letter that Thomas never sent–given to him courtesy of Lucas–he finally learns the truth: he believed that Stéphane was the one who was fated to go on to a life of greatness, that his writing talents would allow him to escape the limitations of the small town in which they both lived. Rather than holding Stéphane back with his own issues, he chose instead to let him go in the only way that he knew how, by simply never returning. It’s an achingly beautiful sequence, made all the more so by the fact that it plays out in the past, with the young Stéphane taking candid photos of his beloved as Thomas’ voiceover reveals his secret motivations. 

Given that Stéphane is a famous novelist, writing clearly plays a prominent role in Lie With Me. For Stéphane it is a way of contending with Thomas’ absence. As Lucas points out, nearly every one of his novels has the name Thomas in some way, and it’s clear that Stéphane has attempted to work through his feelings about his beloved–and, arguably, his conflicted feelings about his home–through his work. We also learn that Thomas bought everything that his former lover ever wrote. In a way, though Stéphane doesn’t know it until near the end, his writing was the glue that held them together, though they never saw one another again. 

In the end, Stéphane gives a dramatic speech to those who have gathered for the anniversary of the distillery, and there’s a rawness to Guillaume de Tonquédec’s performance that grounds it. This is a man who has had to reckon with memory and loss and grief and love and with his own conflicted feelings about the town that he came from. As he reveals in a conversation with Gaëlle Flamand, the woman tasked with ushering him around, beneath his success there is a deep well of loneliness, and it is only when he faces the truth about his feelings and his past and his desires–something that Thomas was never able to do–that he is able to achieve a measure of peace. 

Lie with Me is the type of film that will resonate with any queer person who has come from a small town and has had to reckon with what that means for their present and future selves.