Today is a rough day for Claire.
Thursday night, she and a few of her friends went out for drinks and things got a little out of hand. Now, she can’t stop thinking about the events of that night. While there’s no narration, her preoccupation with her emotions is shown through hand-held camera shots and vibrant hand-held flashbacks in this award-winning short from director Josh Caldwell. (It won the first MTV Student Filmmaker Award a few weeks ago.)
Claire's often preoccupied boyfriend, Ryan, has come to stay with her for the weekend and she desperately wants him to take her mind off of her guilt and her memories of the other night. However, he is, as usual, studying for a test. He explains that he wants to get his studying done early so that he can go out with her later, despite the fact that she doesn’t really want to leave the apartment. She can’t explain to Ryan that her reticence to leave this evening is due to the fear that she might run into the main she had a fling with a couple of nights back, so she allows herself to go along with Ryan’s intent to take her out.
Unfortunately, Ryan takes her to the very bar she was at when she hooked up with the other man and, to her horror, she realizes the other man is at the bar. Overcome with feelings of guilt and fear, she runs from the bar with her boyfriend following after her.
Warning: The next two paragraphs and Content section include spoilers for this short.
Claire is initially unwilling to tell her boyfriend what has gotten her so upset and forces him to wait until after she’s had a night’s sleep. In the morning, she decides to tell him her ‘beautiful lie’. The lie itself is a bit on the confusing side, so it’ll be covered in the content section.
After she’s done telling this lie, he comes onto the bed and she snuggles up to him. Later, we see him go off to school and they appear to be totally fine with one another. (Or perhaps they’re breaking up, but, if so, this is extremely ambiguous.) Additionally, she no longer appears to be struggling with guilt and is no longer plagued by her memories.
With that said, let’s delve deeper into this tale of despair and deceit.
Content
The main storyline of “The Beautiful Lie” is intriguing and well told. The acting is good and believable. Unfortunately, where it gets into some issues is in the ending…during the aforementioned, “beautiful lie.”
With a name like, “The Beautiful Lie”, we know the main character is going to be working her way up to telling a lie of some sort. Additionally, due to the fact that it’s a ‘beautiful’ lie, we expect it to be clever and powerful. With all this expectation, we really want to be able to understand what that lie is. What we don’t want is a lie that’s so full of emotional stops and starts that we’re confused by it and so ambiguous that we’re not sure what it accomplishes.
As it stands right now, the ‘beautiful lie’ appears to be the following: when she went out with her friends, a guy wouldn’t stop hitting on her, and, because he wouldn’t leave her alone, she implies that she slept with him, blaming her boyfriend for being too preoccupied to be with her that night. She repeats again and again that she had wanted Ryan “there with her that night”. From her flashbacks, we know she was hitting on the guy, rather than the other way around, and that she didn’t seem to have any thought of Ryan during her seduction of the other man. If this is the entirety of her lie, then it’s not very logical. No boyfriend would care if his girlfriend slept with another guy because the guy was hitting on her or because she felt lonely—he would just be pissed as hell that she’d slept around on him.
While it’s true that the best lies do contain elements of the truth, lies still need to have an intended purpose for why they’re being told. As it stands right now, it would sort of be like a film in which the main character chose to detonate a nuclear device that killed 100 people. Rather than admitting that he willfully did the deed, he instead claimed that he did it because someone dared him to detonate the bomb--as though this somehow would change anyone’s perception.
