by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My “feature” last night was Lifetime’s latest “world
premiere,” a story called High School Lover
which was illustrated in the promos by a two-shot of an almost unrecognizable
James Franco and a young actress named Paulina Singer, which made it seem like
it would be a story of a middle-aged man becoming sexually obsessed with a
high-school-age nymphet (sorry to borrow your word, Vladimir Nabokov) and
ruining himself and her in the process. Instead it turns out that Paulina
Singer is playing 17-year-old high-school senior Kelley Winters (imdb.com
spells the first name the more conventional way, “Kelly,” but “Kelley” is what
we see on screen) and Franco is playing her father, cinematographer Rick
Winters. The movie opens with a film-within-the-film scene in which Rick is
shooting a movie involving young actors, including a female lead who complains
that the line, “Of all the gin joints in all the world, he has to walk into
mine,” is unmemorable and should be changed. (Just in case we didn’t get the
point — and it’s possible a lot of Lifetime’s audience is as clueless about
film history as the character — one of the other people on the set mentions
that the line is famously from the classic Casablanca.) Kelley is suffering through a major bout of teen
alienation that seems to have been triggered by the death of her mother (we’re
never told how mom died) and her dad’s uncomfortably rapid remarriage to former
model Samantha (Julia Jones).
She also hangs out with high-school friends
Allison (Lana Condor) and Larry (Tyler Alvarez) — Allison, like Kelley, is
straight but Larry is what the activists and social-service people would
probably call “questioning,” attracted to Allison but also interested in
exploring sex with other men. Somehow — the script by Amber Coney and Jessica
Dube is a bit ambiguous about how this happens — the three teens wangle an
invitation to a private party at an underground club where Kelley meets movie
star Christian Booth (François Arnaud), who has a reputation for playing
romantic leads in so-called “chick flicks” but wants — or at least says he wants — parts that will establish himself as a
serious actor. He also says that he’s 26 and has been working since he was
five, and he doesn’t seem to think being a Hollywood star is all that great a
fate even though millions of other men his age would kill to get where he is.
Christian has the hots for Kelley as soon as he sees her, and despite the
resistance of her dad — who grounds her for two weeks after she arrives late
from that party and he learns that she and Allison didn’t spend the night
studying together, as Kelley had said they were doing — Kelley and Christian
drift into an affair that at first stops short of actual sex (she’s only 17 and
therefore it would be statutory rape for Christian to have sex with her) but
crosses one line when Christian flies Kelley across the city in his private
helicopter and Kelley moves her head over his lap and apparently goes down on
him as he’s flying the copter. The film is at its best when the writers and
director Jerell Rosales plunge our three wild-eyed high-school kids into
Christian and his orbit and make the story literally a modern-dress version of Cinderella — not only do Christian and Kelley become a dream
pair but Allison and Larry both end up in the orbit of Tim, a Black stage
magician (I thought he was the sexiest guy in the film and the actor is
regrettably unidentified so far on the film’s imdb.com page) who’s Bisexual and
into three-ways. Larry also gets to snort coke — yes, it’s the sort of
depiction of Hollywood’s inside where drugs are passed around like party favors
— and the three get to do a lot of riding around in Christian’s big white
stretch limousine.
Writers Coney and Dube throw a few roadblocks into the
budding relationship between Kelley and Christian — including one neat scene in
which Kelley sees the latest issue of People, whose cover announces a reconciliation between
Christian and his immediately former girlfriend — but Christian is able to win
her back by persuading her that was just publicity B.S. Eventually, half an
hour before the end, the writers and director Rosales get Christian and Kelley
into bed together — the script makes an oddly Bill Clinton-ish distinction
between getting a blow job and having “sex” — whereupon Christian suddenly
turns into a typical Lifetime villain, showing up at Kelley’s high school and
serving notice that now that he’s taken her cherry he feels like he owns her.
To further boil the melodramatic plot, Kelley’s hated stepmother Samantha
reveals that she had an affair
with Christian years before, when he was an up-and-coming actor and she was a
model, and she knew from her own experience that he was “bad news” for Kelley —
and Christian goes out of his way to insult Kelley’s dad Rick, saying that Rick
is the sort of man who could be content with Christian’s “sloppy seconds” and
showing up on the set of Rick’s latest movie, apparently with the intent of
getting the director to fire Rick. Instead Rick angrily confronts Christian,
and their argument gets filmed on smartphones and “goes viral.” Christian shows
up at the home of Kelley and Samantha with a tire iron, intending to smash his
way in and do heaven knows what — they stupidly try to hide in the basement
and, though they then do the
sensible thing and call the police on 911, they don’t tell the cops their
address (though maybe we were supposed to think their phones had GPS devices
and the cops could find them without a street address to go to), Christian
finds and confronts them until Rick, who left the set of his movie to go home
and pull the satyriasist star off his daughter and his wife, shows up and the two men have a conflict
that at first looks like Christian has offed Rick. Eventually it turns out Rick
is O.K. and the nuclear family, such as it is, returns to normal.
High
School Lover is one of those frustrating
films that could have been better if the writers had explored more of the
issues involved instead of running a potentially interesting situation into the
usual Lifetime tropes. I kept wondering how Christian Booth, if he’s supposed
to be such a big movie star, can do normal human things like walk up to Kelley
and her friends on a beach without any hint that anyone recognizes him — in
real life stars get mobbed by fans when they try to do that and have entourages
around them virtually 24/7 to protect them — and also how Christian seems
blithely oblivious to the potential consequences of courting and bedding a
17-year-old. Even if he escaped prosecution for statutory rape, the scandal
certainly wouldn’t be good for his career! Also he doesn’t seem to have a
manager, an agent or a personal staff around him running interference; I kept
expecting there to be someone in
his entourage warning him about the potential legal and career consequences of
his affair with Kelley, and possibly saying, “Oh, shit, here we go again,” as
Christian’s dick once again leads him into potentially career-ending
complications. Another issue I’d have liked this story to explore is the way a
real-life Christian could have used his star power over Rick; I’d have wanted a
scene in which Christian told Rick, “I can make your career — or I can break it.
Let me sleep with your daughter, and maybe I’ll hire you to shoot my next
movie.” A situation like that would have given James Franco a legitimate
dramatic conflict to play — protect my daughter or boost my career? — instead
of having him move through the film haplessly and express his frustration with
the situation by doing little more than glower. There is a hint towards the end that Christian is going to
use his “pull” with Rick’s director (when he shows up on Rick’s set he says
he’s there “just to see my old friend, who’s directing”) to have him fired, but
the writers make surprisingly little of it. Once again a real-life Christian
might well have told that director, “Get rid of Rick and I’ll be in your next
movie — and with my star power attached you can do that dream project you’ve
been wanting to make for years!” Instead of these deeper, richer possibilities
(had I been writing this I might have even flirted with a Seven Keys
to Baldpate-style meta-ending in which the
entire story turns out to be the plot of Christian’s latest movie!), Coney,
Dube and Rosales seem content to shove a potentially interesting situation into
the usual Lifetime mold, including Christian inexplicably turning from
spoiled-brat star to total psycho in the last few acts, and by refusing to
explore some of the darker possibilities of their story they actually make
their film seem worse than the conventional Lifetime fare.
