by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie was Seduced by a Stranger, only there were at least two other titles considered — the imdb.com page on it
lists it as He Loves You Not (as
in the old flower petal-plucking game, “He loves me … he loves me not … ,”
which actually is featured in the final act) but shows a graphic advertising
the film as Ring of Deception (a
bit deceptive itself because quite a lot of jewelry figures in the story, but a
ring isn’t the key item — it’s a
bracelet). One would think a Lifetime movie called Seduced by a
Stranger would be either about a married
woman having a sexual fling with someone other than her husband, and her
adultery partner turning out to be a crazed stalker out to kill her husband and
get her for himself permanently; or a single woman having a sexual fling with
someone who turned out to be a crazed stalker. Instead Seduced by a
Stranger, directed by Scott Belyea and
written by Suzanne Dunn, is about a con artist and jewel thief, Martin Hale
(Steve Bacic, who’s O.K.-looking but considerably heftier and beefier than
either the tall, lanky, sandy-haired types Lifetime casts as its sympathetic
men or the hot studs Lifetime casts as its male villains), who along with his
partner André (Jim Shield) introduces himself to rich young (or youngish) women, seduces them, gets them to trust him, then
rifles their safes, steals their valuables and gives the loot to André, who
fronts as a legitimate jeweler, to fence.
The latest pigeon he’s latched on to
is the film’s heroine, Julie Stevens (Chandra West, top-billed), who’s his
neighbor in the “Salt Lake” community he’s just moved into and who has made
nearly $2 million running a modern-art gallery with her partner Elizabeth Smith
(Françoise Yip, a marvelously multicultural name). Julie is the single mother
of a teenage son, Charlie (Madison Smith) — ordinarily I’m not attracted to
guys that young but he seemed a lot
hotter than his mom’s would-be seducer — and by Suzanne Dunn’s authorial fiat,
Charlie falls in love with Martin’s daughter Dana (Cate Sproule) just as Martin
is mounting a full-court press to seduce Charlie’s mom. Exactly what happened
to Julie’s ex, Charlie’s father, is a bit of a mystery: at first we assume they
just divorced but later we see Julie at a high point in the mountains
surrounding the town where she’s gone for a jog and she tells a woman of her acquaintance
that this is the first time she’s been back to that spot since … which of
course leads us to assume that Julie is a widow and her husband died in an
accident that occurred there. Anyway, Martin gets Julie’s sexual juices working
for the first time since her husband died, disappeared, divorced her or however the marriage ended — much to the approval of her
business partner, who thinks it’s about time Julie had a man in her life again.
Meanwhile, the Stevenses notice they’re being stalked by someone in a
mysterious black car; actually it’s two people stalking them. One is Sloane Draycott (Lucie Guest), who turns
out to be the real villainess of the piece: she’s a former victim of Martin’s
(or “Eli,” as she knew him when they dated before he ripped her off), and she’s
determined to have her revenge and make him suffer by killing everyone he cares
about before she gets around to offing him. The other stalker is her friend Stu
Brown (Robert Moloney), though his actual relationship to Sloane isn’t specified
and neither is why the hell he’s got so involved in her plot.
In some ways the
most interesting character is Martin’s daughter Dana, the one other person
besides André who knows Martin is a con artist, seducer and jewel thief, who
keeps reminding him that he promised
her this was going to be different, that once he moved to this neighborhood he
wouldn’t steal but would instead live a normal, above-board life and allow her
to finish high school, have friends and maybe even hook up with a potential
boyfriend, which she has in Charlie. Naturally she’s afraid of what’s going to
happen to her own relationship when Charlie’s mom realizes that Martin is a
crook and is just making love to her in order to steal from her — only Dunn
makes Martin a morally ambiguous character, too, and keeps us guessing whether
he sees Julie as just another victim or is genuinely falling in love with her.
This ambiguity made me wonder if Christine Conradt had written this — this kind
of complexity is what usually sets Conradt’s scripts apart from and above the
Lifetime norm — only Dunn takes it too far: the climax occurs when Martin has
summoned Julie to his home, pulling her away from a well-heeled client at the
art gallery, to tell her something that’s really important. Meanwhile, Dana has
told Charlie that they need to
get over to her dad’s even though that means they have to ditch school — only
just when Martin is about to spill the beans to Julie, Sloane, the real
villainess of the piece, walks in with a silver gun (she’d previously used it
to shoot André when he refused to give her back a bracelet Martin had stolen
from her after previously giving it to her — it seems this is the same bracelet
he uses over and over, giving it to all his victims and then stealing it back — and André went for his own gun
instead) and threatens to kill first Julie and then Martin. Martin protests
that he doesn’t really love
Julie, that she was just another “mark,” hoping that if he can convince Sloane
of that she’ll at least let Julie live and just kill him — only Charlie and
Dana arrive, they call the police, the cops arrive almost immediately (much
sooner than you’d expect them to unless they’d already been staking Martin
out), and Martin suffers a flesh wound from Sloane’s gun but will be all right,
while Sloane is arrested.
Where the film really goes over the top is after that, when we’re expected
to believe that the cops have no
idea Martin is a jewel thief (earlier he’s told Dana that he’s hidden his
crimes perfectly and so can stop any time he wants to and live off his previous
proceeds and send her to college on them, but it’s hard to believe he’s hidden
them that well and even harder to
believe Sloane, whom they’ve taken alive, won’t tell them), that he and Julie
are genuinely in love with each other, and it’s all going to end with the four
of them — Martin, Julie, Charlie and Dana — all living together in a bizarre
relationship that isn’t literally incestuous but certainly feels that way. (One can imagine Charlie trying to explain
this to a show-and-tell session at school: “My stepfather is also my
father-in-law!”) Even Christine Conradt didn’t try to pass off something as
sick as this as a happy ending; where I thought this would end was that Martin and Sloane would both die in a
shoot-out and Julie, realizing that Dana would be left without a dad, would
take her in. The weird ending left me with a bad taste after a film that for
most of its running time was just mediocre, considerably better acted by the
youngsters playing the principals’ kids than the principals themselves, and
also beset by the fact that of the four women playing major roles, three —
Chandra West as Julie, Cate Sproule as Dana and Lucie Guest as Sloane — look an
awful lot like each other. Especially when they confront each other, it’s really hard to tell Chandra West and Lucie Guest apart
except Guest has curlier hair. Seduced by a Stranger was hardly the slice of good clean dirty Lifetime
fun I was expecting, and director Belyea didn’t give us any of the soft-core porn we expect and hope for in
Lifetime movies (especially disappointing given that we have two sexually involved couples in the dramatis
personae), though I give writer Dunn points
for at least trying to make the
characters (some of them, at least) morally complex, even though that bizarre
“happy” ending pushed the moral ambiguity too far for me — maybe she saw Martin as a basically
good man who’d just fallen into a trap, but I saw him as a no-good rotter who
deserved his comeuppance, not a good woman’s hand in marriage!
