A Dangerous Affair (Qubefilms, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later in the evening Charles and I watched the latest Lifetime “premiere,” billed as the first episode in this August’s theme of “Love, Lies and Seduction” (which makes one wonder what the hell Lifetime movies are ever about besides love, lies and seduction!). It was called A Dangerous Affair and it was both written and directed by Christie Will Wolf. It deals with a Pilates instructor named Amélie Didot (Aubree Bouché), whose mother named her after Audrey Tautou’s character in the marvelous 2001 French film. Amélie has just relocated from her home town of Montréal, Canada to Florida (it’s not clear where in Florida, but it’s a coastal community with beach access). She opens a new studio and attracts the attentions of a young man, Pierce Dalton (Charlie Bewley). He wins Amélie’s affections by rescuing her dog Buster after he runs off while Amélie is ordering him a dog tag at a local pet store. Amélie is divorced and the reason she moved almost all the way down North America was to get away from her husband, whom she left because he was having extra-relational activities – “Oh! He was cheating!” my husband Charles would say at the moment, and indeed Christie Will Wolf’s script uses the “C”-word. (Presumably his affairs were with other women, though it did occur to me that this movie might have been more fun if she’d caught him having affairs with men; then Wolf could have used the great bad line from the 1982 film Making Love, in which the wife responds to her husband being Gay by saying, “If it were another woman, at least that I could understand!”)

We’re told that Pierce is so irresistibly attractive to women that every female in the dramatis personae has the hots for him – even the married ones, like Barbara Gershwin (Terry Christiansen), a student in Amélie’s Pilates class and just about the only other friend besides Pierce that Amélie has met – though there’s a marvelous Earth-mother heavy-set Black woman named Margaret who lives next door to Amélie and offers to dog-sit for her. Unfortunately, the course of true love doesn’t run smoothly for Amélie, courtesy of Pierce’s ex, a woman named Fran Gibbons (Karlee Eldridge) whom Pierce dated for about three weeks. The first two times Pierce and Fran went out together, he had a great time with her – but, alas, she soon developed a hard-core obsession with him, accusing him of wanting to “C”-word on her with every other woman she saw, even one who was 70 years old. Eventually she starts stalking Amélie as well – they sort-of bond over the cream-colored Volkswagen convertible Fran drives, which attracts Amélie’s attention because she once had a car just like it. For most of the movie I was expecting a last-minute plot twist which would reveal that Pierce was really the crazy one, that Fran was trying to rescue Amélie from his sick attentions, and Amélie would end up with the guy who’d come out from her cable TV company to install her security cameras, who only appeared in one brief scene but I thought was considerably sexier than Charlie Bewley.

But no-o-o-o-o, this was just a straightforward Lifetime tale about a nice young woman, the nice young man who’s genuinely in love with her, and the crazy bitch who’s trying to separate them and ultimately drowns Amélie in the beach water in the final scene – only Black police detective Kip Green (Javon White) arrives on the scene in time to arrest Fran and Pierce gives Amélie mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to save her life. There are a few good scenes in A Dangerous Affair – filmed under the title Her Obsession, which would have actually given the plot away but would also have been more accurate than the one they gave it in the end – notably a scene in which Pierce and Fran are spotted having an argument in a park. A passer-by comes along and tries to help, but gets it wrong and holds down Pierce because he thought he was threatening Fran with a knife, not the other way around. In vain Pierce tries to get the man to ask for Kip when he calls the police, and the other man – who’s a lot bigger and stronger than Pierce – successfully holds him down and allows Fran to escape (for now). But for the most part, A Dangerous Affair is just another by-the-numbers Lifetime thriller in which the “pussy in peril,” as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once described the Lifetime formula, is in peril from another pussy rather than a hot guy who turns out to be a psycho.