"Lie With Me" presents to us a moving tale of first love, secret love and lost love.

On the other hand we also get to see a story about finding out the true character and personality of the ones close to you and also about being honest and candid to yourself. At the core of this picture stands the beautiful and complex acting performance of Guillaume de Tonquedec as the shy and introverted writer Stéphane, who has been and still is openly gay. As a parallel to his character serves Thomas - his first lover - who was in contrast to Stéphane the "popular kid" at their high school but was ashamed of being attracted to a man and as we learn throughout the film - was still ashamed to his dying day. Eventhough this dynamic might seem as a cliche (the "shy character gets secrestly together with the extroverted one") "Lie With Me" provides an interesting take on this genre with its use of queer characters and the fact that Thomas is struggling with his sexual orientation mostly because of himself and his own inner fights (not because of what people around him would think).

I must also mention the simple yet effective way the script was constructed in and also the splendid soft and charming music score.

What can I say. This film killed me.

A beautiful depiction of the (typically) male experience of suffering in silence, privately, keeping all one's problems to oneself. The loneliness and strange nobility of this.

The audience is laid to waste by the 17 year old Thomas' haunting confession that he knew already that he would never experience a happiness like this again; that his life was - in a very real sense - already ending.

Thomas' whole character is cast in a new devastating light. Our previous impression of a boy enjoying the first heady, blossoming of adolescent love is shattered. We see anew. He was really a tortured soul. On the one hand feeling the vitality and intensity of a first love, while shattering under the weight of the knowledge that this brief moment of dreaming and life and love was inevitably, awfully his last.

Stephane's photo at the lake is given a terrible poignancy, as we suddenly see through to this brooding troubled soul, mourning the loss of life, happiness and love in his final moments with Stephane.

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What I think was most clever about this film was how it slowly shifted the audiences focus from the on screen lead (Stephane), to the offscreen life of his lover. From the spurned lover to the more tragic life of his spurner. We gradually realise that the real story, the real tragedy is not the lost love of Stephane, but the lost life of Thomas.

Unbearably the sadness of a life spent in shackles, in inhibition, in the repression of dreams, hits us. We see terribly how the external social realities proved insurmountable to the individual human spirit. A life crushed by responsibility to family and by shame about oneself.

We realise that Thomas was the one truly imprisoned. His 17th year was a brief soaring flight into life and love, before the crushing into line by the world.

As is the book, the story here is autobiographical and it is felt. The movie captures that quite well, there's a rawness to it that makes it feel like you're watching these events as they are unfolding whether they are in the present or the flashbacks. A movie that goes back and forth between the present and the past is nothing new, and someone reminiscing on their first love isn't either, but this film does a good job of it in the way it's structured. The flashbacks actually feel like memories, as bittersweet as they can be, and contrast well with Stephane now as he's still hurt by them and yet cherish them.

The whole cast is great but there are standouts. Guillaume De Tonquédec is the only actor in the cast I knew by sight but I've seen him more in comedic roles - at least that's the memory I have of him - but he nails it. His internal emotional turmoil reads perfectly as he comes back into town and meets Lucas. In the present scenes, it's mostly him and Victor Belmondo - famous last name and familiar features but the first time I've heard or seen him in anything - they are good but not as poignant as the flashbacks. Julien De Saint-Jean and Jérémy Gillet are just amazing in this film, their scenes give life and weight to the scenes in the present. These flashbacks are intense, believable, and capture gay teenage love well.

Lie with Me / Arrête avec tes Mensonges is sweet considering what it's about, even light at times but it works.

@garcwrites.