‘Lie With Me’ Is a Coming of Age Tale With Lost Gay Love
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“Lie With Me” is the first novel that director and screenwriter Olivier Peyon has read from renowned French author Philippe Besson. The book was translated into English by Brat Pack actor Molly Ringwald in 2019 and is loosely based on Besson’s adolescence growing up in the small town of Barbezieux in rural France in 1984.
In the novel, the character of Philippe narrates his love affair with the shy and repressed Thomas Andrieu, the son of a small dairy farmer. He chronicles their first meeting across the playground in the cold winter that leads to their secret sexual awakening, which ends by the summer.
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Some 20 years later in the novel, Philippe has an encounter with Thomas’ son Lucas. The book is dedicated to Thomas, who, in the book, passed away in 2016.
Besson’s novel sits in the autofiction genre, where he embellishes the events of his own life.
Peyon was given an advance copy of the novel by an editor from the publishing house Éditions Julliard, to see if he would consider it for a screenplay adaptation.
“It was really, really moving — especially at the end, I was crying,” Peyon says on a Zoom call from Paris.
“The teenage love story was great, but it was not the path I preferred to take because there are so many stories about that and I wasn’t sure I would love this part so much. But finally when I wrote the script and met with the two young actors who play Phillipe (Jérémy Gillet) and Thomas (Julien De Saint-Jean), I was so proud to say that I was fascinated and in love because they were so mature and intelligent,” Peyon adds.
The director met with Besson to discuss ideas for the script and they hit it off right away. He found out that Besson had written a few screenplays before and understood the process of adapting the book for a different medium.
Peyon’s feature film has a tint of nostalgia with a sharpness of color but is executed in a nonchalant French arthouse way. It’s a combination of “Call Me by Your Name” and “Jongens,” where there’s a longing for love when all odds are against the characters.
He shot the flashbacks at the end of summer in France for the golden colors and “a souvenir of the summer.”
But the 54-year-old director didn’t set out to make a film about queer love.
“I wasn’t thinking in terms of a gay movie. I really love ‘Brokeback Mountain‘ and ‘Les Roseaux Sauvages’ by André Téchiné,” says Peyon, adding that the actor Guillaume de Tonquédec who plays the older version of Philiipe, brought in a mature French audience to the film.
He says he could hear the shock in their voices during the first on-screen sex scene and after the film a few of them approached him.
“They came to me saying, ‘I don’t really like stories between two boys. I think there’s too many movies about that, but with your movie, it’s so impressive and beautiful. They were so in love, just like straight people,’” says Peyon, explaining the reason Besson’s book was a success was because of the universal theme of family secrets.
“My movie is for straight people who don’t know anything about gay people,” he teases.
The film resonates with Peyon because it’s a love letter to his youth, when he was a teenager in the ‘80s. However, it shocked him to find out that his version of punk rock and preppies was different to the ones of his crew members, who were between the ages of 25 and 40.
His crew members idea of the ’80s derives from ideas seen in the mainstream media, such as over-the-top campness and bright colors.
Peyon’s parents applauded him for capturing the spirit of the time down to the minute details of the furniture used in the houses, but the director himself half-jokingly says it was the “sex positions” that he used in the film that really rang a bell with the ‘80s.
The sex scenes are a key part in Besson’s novel and Peyon wanted to honor that.
“The first scenes of the film are quite harsh, but step by step with the sex scenes it adds sensuality and it’s a story of love with grit — those scenes express that the most,” Peyon says.
Throughout filming, Gillet and De Saint-Jean came to build a close friendship and found out that they have mutual friends in common, which made the interactions more organic as the two trusted each other.
“They understood my life and they knew I wasn’t a pervert. I wasn’t making this movie to shoot beautiful young guys, it was not my purpose of interest,” Peyon says.
The actors were given the freedom to choose what to do in the sex scenes and if they didn’t feel comfortable it was scrapped off the script.
“When I would talk to them, I would forget they were in their 20s and I was in my 50s. I was sincerely impressed by them because the other day I was watching a gay movie and when the boys were kissing each other, it was so fake. I called Gillet and De Saint-Jean to thank them again,” Peyon says.
For Peyon, the message of the film is about speaking the truth with your community around you, but also with family and friends.
“Love is always difficult when you’re a homosexual and it’s always difficult to come out, even if your parents are really great because you still have to think more than the other young guys because you are different and you feel different,” Peyon says.
Since the making of the film, Peyon has conjured up a friendship with Besson, who he regularly talks to about new ideas for the screen.
“Maybe we will do another gay movie because that’s a subject he knows very well,” Peyon says.
Besson has told him that the best betrayals in life make the best adaptations for novels and screenplays.
The mellow film was released in February in France and made its U.K. debut at BFI Flare, one of the biggest LGBTQ film festivals in Europe and will slowly roll out internationally this spring and summer.
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