by SARAH ROWLAND

“I never thought I’d being doing a threesome scene with two men.” Rachel Blanchard is referring to her infamous scene with Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth in Atom Egoyan’s murder mystery Where the Truth Lies. “I mean, that’s pretty rare. It dawned on me that at some point in my career I would have to take on a role that involved a three-way with another woman, but never with two men.”

She’s not the only one caught off guard. It’s safe to say a majority of moviegoing audiences never expected that one day they could look up on the big screen and see Mr. Darcy rear-ending The Woodsman as he grinds away on top of a Clueless princess. But the onscreen orgy in question is not nearly as explicit as it sounds. There are no dangling cocks or gyno shots.

Instead, all we really see are a couple of buoyant young titties and some upper body pumping motion. Still, the Motion Picture Association of America would have you believe that this scene has the potential to permanently sear the impressionable retinas of God’s children, causing irreparable psychological damage for generations to come. Final verdict: Where the Truth Lies has been slapped with an NC-17 rating.

“I frankly just don’t get it,” says Bacon, and neither does his co-star.

“We get these hints that it’s one thrust too many somewhere,” says the perfectly British Firth, who is sitting next to his American counterpart in a Toronto hotel room during what has become known as the world’s biggest junket. “So we cut out a thrust here and a nipple there, but they still come back with the same rating. So you realize that nudity’s not the problem.”

Gee, do you think it has something to do with the fact that it’s two men?

“They offered information very early on that, ‘This is not, we repeat, this is not the homosexuality thing,’” recalls Bacon. “And to me that’s a pretty good indication that it’s about the homosexuality.”

For the sweet (and young-beyond-her-years) Blanchard, who attended the appeal hearing with Egoyan to give a seven-minute speech in defense of the film’s artistic merit, the whole situation is frustrating. “If it was Boogie Nights, it would make sense,” she says. “But explicit sex is not even what this movie’s about.”

Fame game

The film is, in fact, a genuinely intriguing whodunit. Set in the ’70s, a cherub cute journalist (Alison Lohman) is hired to write the memoirs of Vinnie Collins (Firth). He is the sophisticated half of a Martin and Lewis type comedy team that split up at the peak of their career in the ’50s. His wacky slapstick partner Lanny Morris (Bacon) called it quits after the body of a flirtatious maid (Blanchard) showed up in their hotel room. It’s only through a series of flashbacks that we get teasing clues as to the real reason behind her untimely death.

The present day scenes, meanwhile, show how years of seclusion and pill-popping have left Vinnie and Lanny with bloated faces and deflated egos. In other words, they must face every star’s worst nightmare: losing their celebrity status. One has to wonder—with big gaps in their respective careers, is this a theme that resonated with the two ageing leads?

“Of course it did,” says Bacon, acknowledging that both he and Firth have experienced highs and lows in the fame game. “I mean that’s a very true aspect of a celebrity’s personality—that you always think that at any moment it’s crumbling, slipping or, ‘Is this guy more famous than me?’ That’s why fame is very confusing—it can so easily define your self-esteem.”

Firth adds: “And this film is a pretty bleak glimpse over that abyss. I mean, I do not want Vinnie Collins’s life to be my script. It’s a lonely kind of desperate spiral into a solitude born out of egotism.”

As for Blanchard, her star has yet to rise before it can fall, so for now she’s just happy that her first cinematic cluster fuck was a positive experience.

“I remember the night before we shot the scene, I was thinking this could be kind of difficult but Kevin, Colin and Atom made me feel very comfortable,” she says in her kitten voice, looking like a naughty schoolgirl in her see-through dress. “I think if you’re going to do a nude scene, you have to feel very respected by your co-stars and your director. If you feel remotely objectified—which I’ve felt before just playing the girl next door [fully clothed]—it’s going to be a horrible experience. But I felt like we were all in the same boat, like a team.”

Where The Truth Lies screens as part of the New Montreal Filmfest at Saint-Denis 2 Thursday, Sept. 22 at 10:30 p.m. and Friday, Sept 23 at 11:30 p.m. at Quartier Latin 9. For more info, visit www.montrealfilmfest.com

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