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Ann, a seemingly emptyheaded Baton Rouge beauty, chatters to her psychotherapist about the garbage overtaxing the environment, until his gentle prompting reveals that her recent marriage has turned sexless — not that sex was ever high on her agenda. She's more irritated with her husband, John, for inviting a college fraternity buddy, who he hasn't seen for 9 years and who she doesn't know, to stay with them.
Ann's session crosscuts between shots of coarsely handsome John, sneaking away from his law office for a whitehot afternoon coupling with Cindy, Ann's sultry, cynical barmaid sister; and of the guest, washing up in a gas station bathroom. He is Graham, a rumpled bohemian with the dropdead bruised good looks of Michelangelo's David, and no earthly possessions beyond clothes, car, and a camcorder with a box of videotapes.
The remarkable debut of 26-year-old writer/director Steven Soderbergh, sex, lies and videotape won first prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It unfolds as a sexual sarabande between these four characters, overseen by a fifth—Soderbergh's intently curious camera, which lures the viewer into a voyeuristic partnership reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's. The establishing sequences quickly mark Soderbergh's assured grasp of cinema rhetoric. As sound from one scene bleeds into another, a narrative structure of singular intricacy seems to construct itself with deceptive effortlessness, and the viewer is absolutely riveted into the movie's place. I cannot recall a recent film whose beginning invokes so potently the inherently strange un-knownness of others before we know them, then provides such pleasure (and anxiety!) as one awakens into knowledge.
Ann, alone, tensely welcomes Graham into a house tidy as her repressions. From the moment he greets her by shyly asking to use