Not to be confused with a 2010 film by feminist pornographer Erika Lust with a very similar title, 2021’s Lust Life Love (NOT, I repeat NOT, Life Love Lust) has its own hold on raunch, being a grungey tale of a polyamorous New York woman whose hitherto free-and-easy glide through various sexual relationships in the sex clubs of New York hits a bump when romance rears its head.
Veronica is a bisexual woman we first meet on the dark streets of nighttime New York as she heads to an assignation with a couple she has never met before. Wearing an animal print coat and stockings with seams up the back, she’s the image – the stereotype maybe – of a woman who knows what she wants sexually.
At the apartment where she meets Juna and Kali, Veronica is forthright, asking them the sort of bold questions they seem a touch squeamish about approaching – what are your boundaries, she wonders. Juna, leering, says he doesn’t have any. Kali, slightly less in the moment, cocks an eyebrow.
The threesome get down to business – cue shots of naked forms writhing in escstatic release – but towards the end it’s Juna and Kali, the established couple, who seem to be having most fun, while new arrival Veronica is perched on the end of the bed checking her phone.
Later, while writing the blog about polyamory that’s given Veronica a kind of minor celebrity, she pauses over a line she’s written about the encounter. And eventually changes it from something like, “I felt nothing at all” to something a lot more in keeping with the multiple partners/multiple holes credo.
And then she meets Daniel (Jake Choi) at a sex party, a newbie who’s wandered in with someone else and who’s never done any of this sort of thing before. And, like Dr Frankenstein, she gives life to a creature that will destroy her, one who takes to polyamory and the whole sexual merry-go-round like a natural, leaving Veronica wondering what her wants and needs in life really are.
Like arriving at a sex party hoping for wild times and going home with a goodie bag containing a piece of birthday cake, Lust Life Love is a disappointment if what you want is a bulletin from the wilder shores of sexual adventure. It turns out to be much more a boy meets girl story, albeit one that’s raw and skanky in parts.
In Sex and the City it turned out that all Sarah Jessica Parker’s character Carrie wanted in the end was a guy called Big. Romantic love. Veronica may be on a similar track, and she may be a similar person, a woman from a nice background who might be ploughing the polyamorous-and-lovin’-it furrow as a way of rebelling.
Veronica is also a woman of a certain age, maybe a decade older than Daniel and perhaps a touch old for the circuit. Does it help if we know that Stephanie Sellars – who plays Veronica, co-directed the film (with Benjamin Feuer) and also produced it – once wrote a weekly sex column called Lust Life? I think it probably does.
The delusional woman who doesn’t know what she really wants – or does but just can’t face up to how suburban it all sounds – Veronica is in many ways a familiar character and one it’s not easy to like. Yet Sellars imbues her with a tragic-heroine sadness that suits the role. Jake Choi is also rather good as Daniel, the guy who was previously trapped in a sexless marriage but who is now, suddenly, doing all the things Veronica says she loves doing but deep in her heart has either tired of or never really enjoyed in the first place.
Know thyself, in short. Polyamory doesn’t get quite the big sell that the setup suggests. Maybe Erika Lust is the way to go for that sort of thing.
Lust Life Love – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
