by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I put on last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie, a production
called Her Boyfriend’s Secret that put
some intriguing new meat on the skeleton of Lifetime clichés and offered some
fascinating direction by Lisa France even though she was hamstrung by the hackneyed
script by Bo Johnson. Johnson has no other credits on imdb.com but France has
an interesting set; according to her imdb.com biography she graduated from
Brooklyn College with a double major in biology and philosophy. She also played
college basketball and emigrated to Britain to play professional basketball in
Manchester (who knew Britain had
professional women’s basketball?) before returning to the U.S., getting a
master’s in somatic studies and then becoming “smitten” with the idea of being
a filmmaker after having seen Meet Joe Black (the remake of Death Takes a Holiday). Her jobs in film have ranged from producer,
director and writer to second-unit direction, assistant direction, acting,
stunt work, stand-in work, cinematography and production management. Judging
from Her Boyfriend’s Secret —
produced by our old Lifetime friends Tom Berry and Breanne Hartley (Pierre
David, Berry’s usual producing partner, doesn’t seem to have been involved this
time out) — France is a potentially very interesting director who deserves to
get (or maybe write herself) better scripts. The heroine — the “pussy in
peril,” as New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd once called the central characters of Lifetime movies —
is Melissa Davis (Kelly Sullivan), a Los Angeles-based interior designer who’s
in a business partnership with Travis (the quite hunky Jordan James Smith);
he’s a contractor and whenever he gets a job to build or remodel a house, he
recommends her to the owner as a decorator. Travis has been single since his wife
Beth died three years earlier after a long illness — we presume it’s cancer but
writer Johnson doesn’t tell us that specifically — and apparently Beth and
Melissa were good friends and indeed Melissa was the one who first introduced
Beth to Travis. Melissa hasn’t dated either since her last boyfriend, a
psychologist, dumped her without giving her a reason. Melissa falls hard for
John Anderson (Mark Famiglietti), the darkly handsome man who’s her and
Travis’s latest home-remodeling client, and the two start dating and going to
expensive restaurants — though, alas, they don’t have sex, or if they do we don’t get to see any of it, depriving us of the
soft-core porn scenes that are such a large part of the Lifetime movie’s
appeal. Of course, John Anderson isn’t who or what he seems to be (ya figure?);
Melissa’s first indication that he has a dark side comes when the two are out
jogging and a man Melissa doesn’t know comes up to John and addresses him as
“Christian.”
Later, while spending some time at John’s house to supervise the
remodeling and installation of the furniture she’s picked out for him, Melissa
is confronted by Carrie Avery (Maiara Walsh), who claims she’s a former
girlfriend of John — whom she knows as Philip Anderson — until she dumped him as too weird and he
got so ridiculously possessive he actually attempted to strangle her and only
the timely intervention of a couple of her women friends saved her life. At
first Melissa dismisses Carrie as a jealous nutcase but eventually she
investigates her claims, including that John spends a lot of time in Medford,
California. It seems that all the “business trips” he takes every week, which
he said took him out of town to such exotic locales as London, Paris, Geneva
and Rome, really all to Medford — Melissa learns this by going into John’s home
office and rummaging through his papers, seeing not only his credit-card
statements but also a clipping of a journal article on abnormal psychology.
Travis decides to go to Medford to look up “John” and finds that his real name
is Christian Wellesley and he’s a world-renowned neurosurgeon and expert on,
you guessed it, abnormal psychology. He’s also been married to the same woman
for 15 years and they have a six-month-old daughter, though not only does that
seems like an awfully long time span to go childless before actually
conceiving, Mark Famiglietti just doesn’t look old enough to have had a 15-year
marriage and the actress playing his wife looks more like his mother on screen.
Travis finds all this out but, because Medford is so remote it has almost no
cell-phone service, he’s unable to relay this information to Melissa before
John catches him, bashes in the side window of his car with a tire iron, then
sets the car to roll off a cliff with Travis in it, assumes he has killed him
and leaves. Travis survives but ends up in a coma; Melissa visits him in the
hospital but gets chased out when visiting hours are over. Meanwhile, John has
traced Carrie, broken into her house and killed her, and Melissa discovers the
body when she drives out there hoping to see Carrie for more derogatory
information about John. Travis finally recovers from his coma and there’s a
tender When Harry Met Sally-ish
scene in which Melissa realizes that it’s Travis whom she really loves and
wants to be with when all this is over.
The climax occurs when Melissa drives
out to Medford to confront John’s — Christian’s, actually — wife and explain to
her that during the week he lives with her as half of a married couple, but on
weekends he moves to L.A. and poses as a bachelor to date other women. Before
she goes up there she finds a gun in John’s home in L.A. and packs it in her
purse, but she leaves it behind when she goes up to Mrs. Wellesley’s door and
tries to tell her the truth about her husband — which, of course, she doesn’t
believe. (The abused and cheated-on wife is quite the most interesting
character in Bo Johnson’s script even though we see her so briefly — just a
previous short scene with Travis and the climax with Melissa.) Then John shows
up carrying a gun and, much to his wife’s shock, tries to shoot Melissa — and
Melissa makes it to her car, grabs the purse containing her gun, and shoots
John with it as the missus goes into a hissy-fit that this crazy woman has shot
her husband. For a moment I was wondering if writer Johnson would have her take Melissa’s bullet and give John a chance to
escape, but no-o-o-o-o, John is
merely wounded and the police take him into custody for Carrie’s murder, while
Travis recovers and he and Melissa end up together. There are some quite
effective suspense scenes and intercuts in France’s direction — she’s obviously
a quite capable filmmaker and I would hope she gets more opportunities to
direct, especially more opportunities to direct away from the Lifetime salt
mines. Johnson’s script has a few offbeat touches — making the villain a
psychologist and neurosurgeon is a nice one, and so is having him explain
himself to Melissa at the end by saying all his crimes are research material
for a book he’s writing about how men are innately superior to women because
they’re more aggressive. Men, he says, will respond to attacks by fighting
back, while women will do … he doesn’t explain quite what, but he says the
difference, whatever it is, means that any strong, powerful man like him can
dominate any woman, as he’s proven in his marriage and his various affairs.
Mostly, though, Her Boyfriend’s Secret is a typical Lifetime story only sporadically livened up with France’s
imaginative direction (particularly the intercuts between Carrie’s murder and a
domestic scene between Melissa and Travis), though I give this one points not
only because the good guy is sexier than the bad guy (by a considerable
margin!) but also because the heroine’s African-American friend and confidante
is still alive at the fade-out, telling Melissa and Travis that she knew they were meant for each other romantically
well before they realized that themselves.
