Few
movie titles have been as literal as Sex,
Lies, and Videotape, writer/director Steven
Soderbergh’s tour-de-force debut feature. And although the first word of
the title makes a promise that a more conventional, Hollywood film would
deliver on, Soderbergh’s very personal, wry, and grown-up comedy of sexual
manners is all talk and almost no action, at least not onscreen, where all we
get is white static. Sex, like everything else in the lives of its four
protagonists, is treated in an adult and intellectual manner. Filmed in real
settings, on a shoestring budget in the director’s hometown of Baton Rouge,
with a cast of mostly unknown young actors and focusing on controversial
subject matter, the movie was an overnight sensation when it was screened at Sundance, later going on to win
the grand prize at Cannes. Just like James
Spader’s Graham, an outsider who rides into town in a ’69 Cutlass,
challenging the dysfunctionality of the American Dream through his very being, Soderbergh
provides a new, alternative view of what American cinema is and what it could
be. The ‘independence’ of Sex, Lies, and
Videotape, its uniqueness, lies in both its content and form, if more
pronounced in the former.
