Lie With Me: 'Stunning and heart-gripping' André Aciman

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I knew where the key was. It was dark and the air was stale but while the gestures could have been more precise, we were not modest.

Need I tell you there is a super-duper twist shortly before the end? I’m sure I do not. Need I tell you exactly what that twist is, and that we get an extensive, 80% hilarious sex scene to prove it? I’m almost equally sure I do not. Lie With Me is one of those productions that doesn’t compel you to watch by dint of innovation or fresh insight into the human condition, but invites you in to see how they’re going to resolve this one this time. It’s a warm bath, not an invigorating shower. It even had Anna meeting a snake on the driveway of her new home as she returned from a jog in the opening five-weeks-earlier scene. “This country is full of things that could kill you!” she told Jake when she made it beyond the front door of Dunforeshadowin’. He tells me about his little sisters, Nathalie and Sandrine. Sixteen and eleven years old respectively. Lie with Me may be auto-biographical as a genre or may be better described as fiction, but there can be no doubt that it is honest. It bares the soul and the pain of its author as few books ever do. Difficulty, you can cope with; you can deploy ruses, try to seduce. There is beauty in the hope of conquest. But impossibility, by nature, carries with it a sense of defeat. Obviously he’s still bothered by what I said about leaving the farm, “killing the father.” He seems to think that I know nothing about it. He also thinks that I don’t realize the violence of such an act. He’s offended by what he views as carelessness on my part.

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I watch him doze and then his face rolls over to the left, instantly waking him up. He puts the headphones from his Walkman on my ears. He wants me to listen to Bruce Springsteen. I remember the movement of his hips pressing against the pinball machine. This one sentence had me in its grip until the end. Two young men find each other, always fearing that life itself might be the villain standing in their way. A stunning and heart-gripping tale.” —André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name At seventeen, I don’t have a clear awareness of the situation. At seventeen, I don’t dream of a modern life somewhere out there, in the stars, I just take what’s given to me. I don’t nurse any ambition, nor do I carry around any resentment. I’m not even particularly bored. If I had known it then, I could have told him that Marguerite Duras was crazy for the Hervé Vilard ballad “Capri, It’s Over.” In Yann Andrea Steiner, she wrote:

The source of this missing and longing can be found in this first desertion, this imbecilic burning love.It was a carnival, one that happened every year during Easter on the Place du Château. There were rides, a carousel with wooden horses, bumper cars; a rifle-shooting game with pink and blue stuffed toys to win; a slide; slot machines; a punching ball to measure your strength; candy stands; the scent of cotton candy and waffles; alcoholic drinks for the grown-ups; a carnie, hidden from sight, who didn’t stop barking into a microphone; and the music too loud, all the time. There were no clowns or magicians, no doubt they were too expensive for a town like Barbezieux. It’s during the dying notes of this song that Thomas appears. I didn’t see him come in, but all of a sudden he’s there in the middle of the room. From then on he occupies all the space, claiming it for himself. You would swear that the light went out on everyone else, or at least dimmed. (It reminds me of a screen test I saw once that James Dean did for Rebel Without a Cause. All the kids are gathered in a room; they’re healthy and attractive, their faces lined up like they’re in an El Greco painting, and then Jimmy walks in. Through the lens of the camera he looks smaller than the others, a little stoop shouldered and bookish, with a slight smirk on his face, and you can’t take your eyes off him. He makes everyone else disappear. I’ve probably embellished the scene in retrospect, though I do believe that there are certain men who eclipse everyone else in the room and leave you breathless.) You can tell from the clothes, the high-waisted ultra-skinny acid-wash jeans, the patterned sweaters. Some of the girls wear woolen leggings in different colors that pool around their ankles. The film was set and shot in Toronto, primarily The Annex. It premiered at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival. It’s at the end of the town. I’m surprised by the choice of the place, since it’s not at all central, or easily accessible. I think: He must like places away from the crowd. I do not yet understand that he obviously chose it to be out of sight. I am in this state of innocence, this stupidity. If I were used to exercising caution, or had developed the art of not responding to questions—but I barely know anything yet of concealment, of the clandestine.

And finally, who remembers the C terminals? They say “S” today, I think. Even if this initial does not represent the same reality. These were the classes in mathematics, supposedly the most selective, the most prestigious. The ones that opened the doors to the preparatory classes that in turn led to the big schools, while the others condemned you to local colleges or professional studies or vocational school or just stopped there, as though you had been left in a cul-de-sac. I have no idea that one day I will write books. It’s an inconceivable hypothesis. If by some extraordinary chance the idea happened to cross my mind, I would have chased it away. The son of a school principal, an imposter?

I am an exemplary student, one who never misses a class, who almost always gets the best grades, who is the pride of his teachers. Today, I’d like to slap this seventeen-year-old kid, not because of the good grades but because of his incessant need to please those who would judge him. He lives on a farm. His parents are farmers who own a little plot of land. They are modest people who sell the product of their vineyard to cognac distilleries. He corrects himself: Actually the vineyard is just a row of vines surrounded by low walls.