Release Date: December 13, 2013 (Limited)
Available on VOD platforms December 15, 2013
Director: Terri Hanauer
MPAA Rating: NR
Film Pulse Score: 5/10
As I watched Sweet Talk, I thought, “This might make a good play.” It was only after finishing it that I realized it was based on a play by Peter Lefcourt who wrote the screenplay. It happens almost entirely in two rooms as a man – last-name Samson (Jeffrey Vincent Parise) – and a woman – Delilah (Natalie Zea) – share intimate moments over a phone-sex line. At least, his calling into the phone-sex line is the first step. When Delilah answers, the two begin an unconventional conversation that will lead them off the $2.99/minute line and onto longer, monetarily free conversations.
As the film opens, we meet Delilah who seems to be a cultured woman or at least one who wants to be. Her alarm goes off at 11pm, and there’s a cello in her room that I wondered if she ever plays. She’s reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and she uses a Latin phrase when talking to the other woman who works out of the same apartment for the phone-sex line. I got the impression that she was lonely, sad, and unfulfilled. We also meet a struggling writer who remains unnamed at first. He lives alone, too, except for his canary, Leon. On a whim, he decides to call into a local phone-sex line and Delilah answers. Thus, the journey for them both begins.
He calls himself “John,” and Delilah begins like any professional by trying to get him to talk and tell her some basic things before getting his credit card number. He is reluctant to share and both Delilah and the audience understand that he would rather “just talk” than be aroused and come to an over-the-phone climax. Still, he provides the credit card number – although we know he cannot afford to talk to on one of these lines – and the two begin to talk. It is not long before he has her naked, wearing a fur coat, and sitting in a Budapest train station. At this time, he does not develop the story too much, much it does intrigue her. To make a long story short, the two will hang up and call back a few times as they do a type of dance, trying to establish rules for how they will talk to each other.
Ultimately, Delilah breaks the rules, takes all the phone-sex lines off the hook except one and calls him back without charging him. The two create a story of her being a wealthy contessa in Austria-Hungary and he being an assassin to falls in love with her at a party. Her husband, the count, discovers them talking and the two duel which Samson wins. Thus, her waiting in the train station is for him to escape the count’s police friends and reunite with her so they can travel to Vienna together. All of this is played out for the audience, not in their respective apartments, but at the duel site, at the train station, and eventually on a train. On the train, they have sex and the two share a connection over the phone that satisfies them in the way it is supposed to on such a phone line.
But, the connection does not end there. She wants more, but he is finished. It is the same old story of differences between men and women when it comes to sex (among other things). She wants more to the story and yet he concludes it by having his “character” shot by border patrol guards so that all they had was that time on the train. She does not stand for it and calls him back, making up her own story without his input – setting it in 1939 Nazi-controlled Vienna – wherein she is his nurse and he is a mute invalid.
Neither story they concoct is all that interesting, and for a film like this to succeed the dialogue and the imagination of its main characters have to be spot-on. I like the idea that two strangers’ minds meld in more-than-sexual storytelling on a phone-sex line, but the execution has to be better than what Lefcourt and Hanauer have done here. Zea (known to me from “Justified” and “The Following”) and Parise are quite good in their respective roles; they simply do not have the goods to play with that they need to make a truly compelling film.
