Lust (T. D. Jakes Productions, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Actually Deadly Dating Game looked like a masterpiece by comparison with the other Lifetime movie Charles and I watched last night, a much-ballyhooed “Premiere” of a film called Lust: A Seven Deadly Sins Story. Charles and I have been joking about this title all week, with me saying, “Of course they were going to start out with Lust! They wouldn’t make the first one Gluttony!”, and Charles replying by listing several non-deadly sins, including consecrating a bishop without authority from the Pope, that would make even more boring movies than Gluttony. (But then I remember – though I never saw – an early-1970’s foreign film called Le Grand Bouffe that was about a group of 1-percenters holding a super-banquet and literally eating themselves to death, so maybe the Gluttony movie has already been made.)

Lust was based on the first in a series of “inspirational” books about the seven deadly sins by Black author Victoria Christopher Murray, who according to her publisher (Simon & Schuster) has won an NAACP Image Award, perhaps for writing books about Black one-percenters in Atlanta, Georgia and thereby letting white America know that there are Black one-percenters. (Then again Lifetime has already aired Pride and Prejudice: Atlanta, an unusually good movie that did a quite inventive and generally credible job of transmuting Jane Austen’s classic into a tale of Black one-percenters in Atlanta.) According to a Web page put up by her publisher, Simon & Schuster (https://www.simonandschuster.com/series/The-Seven-Deadly-Sins). Murray is working on a series of novels dealing with all seven of the deadly sins as they’re expressed by rich Black Atlanteans but so far she’s just published four: Lust, Envy, Greed and Wrath. Lifetime has so far filmed at least two of them, Lust and Envy (they’re premiering Envy next week), and they’re heavily promoting them.

I wanted to see Lust partly because of the lubricious potential of the subject and partly because of all the scenes in Lifetime’s promo of the two Black male leads, Tobias Truvillion and Durrell “Tank” Babbs, going shirtless. I was looking forward to plenty of soft-core porn of both these hot men having at the female lead, Keri Hilson. Alas, Murray’s book, as adapted here (so far the imdb.com page on this is just a “stub” and doesn’t list director or writers), carefully avoids anything lubricious or, indeed, anything particularly exciting non-sexually either. The plot: Tiffany (Keri Hilson) is getting cold feet about her upcoming marriage to Damon King (Tobias Truvillion), well-to-do Black entrepreneur (who lives in a giant house whose exterior has been used before by several Lifetime producers as a residence of both Black and white characters). She met him when she went to work for him in one of his companies and they started dating. He moved her into his giant palace of a house and they’ve been having sex, but she finds it less than satisfying and wonders if she’d enjoy it more with another man.

The other man turns out to be Damon’s half-brother Trey King (Durrell “Tank” Tubbs), who’s just been released for prison after a seven-year bid for a crime carefully left unspecified, and who’s out to seduce Tiffany almost from the moment they meet. Only it takes forever for the two of them to get anywhere near the bedroom – for most of the movie they’re just doing suggestive things like him kissing her neck and her anointing him with lavender oil. The rest of the plot, to the extent this film has one, is Tiffany trying to open her own spa and fighting off the attempts of Damon to help her – he’s got all these successful businesses but she wants to show him she can succeed on her own – and when the wiring in the building she’s rented for the spa turns out to be substandard, Trey offers to rewire it for free and charge her only the cost of the materials. Damon doesn’t want her to take Trey on his offer, but she does and that gives him the opportunity to hang out at her workplace and give her smoldering looks.

Every so often Tiffany gives us a voice-over narration explaining how the as yet unconsummated affair with Trey is wrecking her life and making her feel miserable about herself, until on the eve of her wedding to Damon she slips out of the house and goes to the hotel where she and Damon are supposed to spend their wedding night to meet Trey for what she hopes is going to be a hot night having soul-shattering sex with the ex-con stud. Only [spoiler alert!] instead of giving her the thrilling time she was expecting, Trey rejects her and says he only wanted to seduce her to get back at Damon because (as we’ve begun to suspect several acts before) the crime for which he was sent to prison was one he and Damon committed together, only Damon escaped and used the proceeds from whatever it was as seed capital to launch his “legitimate” businesses, while Trey became Damon’s fall guy and rotted in prison for seven years. Then, in a bizarre twist that in some ways is the best part of the movie even though neither Murray nor her adapters are able to make it the slightest bit credible, Damon reverts to his thug origins, pulls out a gun, puts on a watch cap and other “gangsta” attire, and sets out to kill the man who seduced his wife, and when he realizes it’s his half-brother (they had the same father but different mothers) the two have a fight before Damon pulls back and says he’ll leave Trey alone if Trey gets out of Atlanta and never comes back.

Damon throws Tiffany out of his house and she goes to stay with her grandparents, who raised her – they’re both good God-fearing Christians and, indeed, her granddad is the minister who was supposed to perform her wedding – and eventually she and Damon get back together, but only after a year or so and only on condition that they not have sex with each other until they’re actually married. They do that, and in the end we see them not only together but Tiffany legitimately pregnant – thereby communicating the anti-sex message of mainstream Christianity that sex isn’t supposed to be fun: it’s only supposed to happen between married heterosexuals and only for purposes of reproduction. If the makers of Lust had deliberately set out to make as boring a film as possible with that salacious title, they succeeded big-time: Charles wondered why the writers were taking so long to get Trey and Tiffany into the bedroom together for the hot extra-relational sex scene we were both anticipating, and I was recalling Arturo Toscanini’s comment about the length of the second act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in which Wagner took so long to get his adulterous lovers together Toscanini joked, “If they’d been Italians they’d have already had seven kids by now!”

As someone who was wanting to see lots of hot soft-core action and an example of Lifetime’s typical good-clean dirty fun, Lust was even more disappointing than it was to Charles – who wasn’t expecting much – and it didn’t help that none of the three leads were particularly appealing. Tiffany’s self-pity and apparent helplessness got old and boring after a while – the way the story was constructed she got all the pain and remorse from her lust without actually having the fun part – while Damon comes off as an over-controlling maniac and Trey as an abusive thug. Oddly, the story had the potential for being quite a bit more interesting if some of the potential hints Murray and her adapters dropped had been followed up – like the whole irony that Damon’s fortune has been built on the roots of a crime (had Trey threatened to expose him in their final confrontation, the denouement would have been a lot more interesting) and the speed with which Damon descends from business success to street gangsta when his manhood has been threatened also suggests far more potential depth to these characters than we got. It also doesn’t help that Tiffany’s grandfather, when he’s shown preaching a sermon, sounds more like Flip Wilson’s “Church of What’s Happening Now!” parody of a Black minister than the real thing – and he’s apparently a recurring character in the series since we also saw him in the pulpit in the promos for Envy. Lust was surprisingly boring (especially for a film with that title!) and I’m not looking forward to Envy, though from the promos it appears to be about a woman who has the hots for her sister’s husband and I’m wondering if there’s anything in Victoria Christopher Murray’s background that draws her to write about sibling rivalry!`