Terry McMillan's "Tempted by Love" (Undaunted Content, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 18) I put on a Lifetime movie that I’d deliberately bypassed the night before: Terry McMillan’s “Tempted by Love.” I hadn’t been especially interested in this one – from the promos it looked like Lifetime was poaching on Hallmark’s territory – but it was O.K. if awfully predictable. It was also shown under the title Tempted by Love: A Terry McMillan Presentation, and was reportedly based on a book of the same title by the same author. McMillan’s mission in life seems to be to give African-Americans (and Blacks of other nationalities as well) equal access to the same stupid clichés of romantic fiction as white people, especially white women. The central characters are Ava (Garcelle Beauvais, who also gets an executive-producer credit, as does McMillan), a 50-year-old super-chef who’s head chef at an exclusive restaurant in Brussels (yes, the one in Belgium), who flies back to her home town of Buford, South Carolina to be with her aunt Judy (Loretta Devine), who’s just had an accident that broke her leg; and Luke Bailey (Vaughn W. Hebron), a 32-year-old stud who was aimed for a career as a professional baseball player (he’d won a college scholarship) when he tore his ICL (Google says “ICL” is actually an eye operation for nearsightedness and astigmatism, but the script by Tamara Gregory based on McMillan’s novel makes it seem like an irreparable muscle injury – I think they really meant “ACL,” short for “Anterior Cruciate Ligament,” a knee injury; for more information about it, see https://orthoinfo.aaos.org/en/diseases--conditions/anterior-cruciate-ligament-acl-injuries/), retreated to Buford and went to work for a local hardware store. Ava and Luke meet when one of Luke’s side jobs is being a chauffeur in a car owned by the same boss he works for at the hardware store.

Though he’s head-over-heels in love with Ava from the moment they meet, despite the 18-year age difference, Luke is also a serious young man whose ambitions are either to obtain a contractor’s license so he can run a construction firm or to train as a professional chef himself. Naturally, he thinks it’s wonderful that a woman chef with a superstar reputation – though one who’s also been fired from her current job long-distance (the white, white-haired Lesbian who’s her current agent – we learn she’s Gay when Ava, on the phone to her, congratulates her for getting rid of her previous girlfriend and acquiring another one – tells her the Brussels restaurant has fired her but she’s lining up another high-end job for her in Zurich) – has figuratively, and ultimately literally, dropped into his lap. Aunt Judy and Ava’s best friend Dina (Donna Biscoe) have both been wondering for years when she’d get serious about a man – she’s had a few casual flings (including one with a co-worker on her last job whom she was hoping would leave his wife for her, but when they finally divorced he married yet another woman) but nothing even remotely serious. Luke keeps pressuring her for a date, and they finally have one, sort of. Before that happens there’s a charming scene taking place on New Year’s Eve in which Judy insists she must have black-eyed peas, and Luke obligingly shows up with two plastic containers for Judy and Ava. Judy appreciates hers while Ava gives Luke some professional advice, including telling him to use pork broth instead of chicken for the stock next time. Ultimately the two have sex, in one of the hottest soft-core porn scenes Lifetime has given us in quite a while – we even get some nice, yummy close-ups of Vaughn W. Hebron’s right nipple – even though Ava is going through menopause (we know that because she’s having hot flashes and the car in which he’s driving her has an air-conditioning system that doesn’t work).

The rest of the movie, effectively directed by Tailiah Breon (a young Black woman who, like so many other directors these days, got her start making music videos) from Tamara Gregory’s O.K. script, leads up to the inevitable crisis in Ava’s and Luke’s relationship. Ava is determined to continue her career and take the job in Zurich, despite osteoarthritis in her arms that’s making it harder for her to do all the chopping involved in cooking, while Luke wants her to stay with him in Buford and accept a job offer from the owner of a local hotel, who wants to hire Ava to supervise the kitchens of the high-end restaurants in the 10 hotels he already owns and the additional ones he wants to build. It builds up to an O. Henry-esque ending in which Luke gets a scholarship to study at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris – while Ava takes the Buford job, though they kinda-sorta agree more or less to get back together after he finishes his one-year course at Le Cordon Bleu. Tempted by Love is an O.K. movie but not really anything special (aside from the hot glimpses of the Black male lead’s bod!). Charles burned out on it a half-hour before the end and went to bed, then I had to tell him how it ended when he got up this morning – and though it was all right it was no great shakes, and frankly I like Lifetime’s thrillers better than their romances.