Film Review: Indiscretion (dir by John Stewart Muller)

Indiscretion is a strange one.

(And by strange, I mean dull and kind of pointless.)

This film premiered on Lifetime last Saturday but, as I watched it, it quickly became obvious that it wasn’t originally produced for Lifetime.

For one thing, the film was shot on location in Louisiana.  Instead of letting Montreal or Toronto stand in for a generic American city, this film was actually shot on the streets of New Orleans.  (Unfortunately, the film also made New Orleans seem kind of boring.)

Secondly, Indiscretion turned out to be one of those films where the soundtrack would suddenly go silent whenever a character said anything stronger than “damn.”  It was odd because you would see a character very obviously saying something like, “Fuck you,” but you wouldn’t be able to hear the voice.  I guess that was to protect the gentle sensibilities of the viewer but what about people who read lips?

And finally, Indiscretion didn’t feature any of the usual Lifetime actors.  Instead, it starred Mira Sorvino as a frustrated wife and Cary Elwes as her politician husband.  Sorvino’s real-life husband, Christoper Backus, played the troubled sculptor who has an affair with Sorvino and then ends up stalking her family.

So, no, Indiscretion was clearly made to, at the very least, be released straight to video.  It was not meant for commercial television.  And yet, somehow, it ended up making a somewhat awkward premiere on Lifetime.

Anyway, Indiscretion starts out well enough.  It doesn’t waste any time arranging for Sorvino and Backus to meet at a fund raiser and for them to end up having a passionate affair.  Sorvino, of course, claims that it was just a weekend fling and that she loves her husband.  Backus refuses to believe her and soon, he’s worming his way into her family.  He befriends her husband and even gets to go on a hunting trip with the governor of Louisiana.  He also ends up having an affair with Sorvino’s teenage daughter.

(Or, at the very least, he takes some pictures of her, which Sorvino later discovers.  It’s a sign of how haphazardly constructed this film is that you’re never quite sure what’s going on with Backus and Sorvino’s daughter.  Backus also uses one of those old Polaroid cameras to take pictures.  Apparently, troubled artists don’t use digital cameras.)

The problem is that, after the first, artfully-shot sex scene, the film itself slows down to an interminable crawl.  It’s as if the film’s director, editor, screenwriter, and producers all forgot that the audience has already seen a hundred movies just like this one.  Nothing surprising happens and, unlike the best Lifetime films, Indiscretion never winks at the audience or indirectly acknowledges the clichéd nature of its narrative.  The whole thing is just painfully dull and no amount of mood lighting is going to change that.  There is a little twist at the end but most viewers will probably be so bored with it all that they probably won’t even notice.  That’s just the type of film this is.

If you want to see an entertainingly over-the-top and pulpy film about people having sex in New Orleans, I would suggest checking to see if Zandalee is still available on YouTube.