A moment when Ann is talking to her therapist about resenting her husband’s invitation of an old friend to visit is followed not soon after by Graham’s arrival at the house-but not before we see a scene of her husband and her sister in bed. Over and over, we have a-ha moments when watching this film. And what makes the progress of the film so devilishly seductive is the way in which Soderbergh both respects and does not respect the unities of time, both as it is managed in more traditional narratives and as one would think it would be managed to push this particular story forward. No one can handle his presence, and the world we see at the end of the film is the opposite of the world we see at the beginning. The trouble he stirs up is twofold: he turns on the last-call light for John’s affair with his wife’s sister Cynthia (an indelible Laura San Giacomo), and he does so by…well…doing what he does, which is filming women talking about their sexual experiences. He’s staying with John, a college buddy, played by the never-creepier Peter Gallagher, and his repressed wife Ann, played by Andie MacDowell with a powerful mood of shedding shyness. In this case, the mysterious outsider is Graham, played here by a young and mischievous-looking James Spader. Mysterious outsider blows into town, causes a lot of trouble, and everyone’s life is changed. The spare plot of the film is an old story, one you’ve probably heard a million times.
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