Review: Lie With Me is a bittersweet queer memory film

Do you tell them about their parent as a young person? What if that teenage love was the departed parent's life-long secret? Is it your job to spill the family secrets?

French director Olivier Peyon crafts a warm and charming stroll through the hills of France's Cognac region in this tale of queer romance and reminiscence based on the autobiography of French writer Philippe Besson.

Successful French author Stefane Belcourt (Guillaume de Tonquedec) has arrived on the estate of one of Cognac region's great vineyards, invited to be the Cognac producer's brand ambassador and the keynote speaker for a weekend schmoozing their bigger American retail sellers.

The stakes are high for the company and they're not quite aware that their invited artist has accepted the invitation for his own reasons, starting with a two-year-long writer's block and most especially to confront his own personal demons.

As Stefane dodges the company's PR woman Gaelle (Guilaine Londez), who is wanting to see a copy of his still-unwritten keynote address, he finds himself intrigued by another of the company's staff.

Young Lucas (Victor Belmondo), the company's American agent, looks familiar to Stephane, has one of the region's recognisable surnames, and even drives an old motorbike that sparks memories.

As a teenager going to high school in the region, a younger Stephane (Jeremy Gillet) was a shy and nervous boy, uncomfortable in his own skin and especially uncomfortable about his homosexuality, and so when he is approached by Thomas (Julien De Saint Jean), the school's confident charmer, he is unsure.

But Thomas is attracted to Stephane and wants to spend time with him, though only on condition that their time together is strictly private.

As their friendship blossoms into a passionate romance, there's a bittersweet edge, with graduation and university elsewhere pending for Stephane and a life left behind running the family farm for Thomas.

Importantly, too, for Thomas, is his own prison of family and societal expectations that would never allow him to be open about his friendship with Stephane and what that might mean about his own self-identity.

Decades later, as Stephane's big keynote speech looms, there are hard conversations to be had between the older writer and the young wine merchant.

I don't know about the MA rating for this film, issued apparently for "a strong sex scene". Yep, that scene is certainly in there, though I don't think it's any more revealing than dozens of M-rated films featuring straight couples.

Mostly, it's a sweet film of an older man dusting off the bittersweet memories of a lost friendship, based on Besson's teen years in Barbezieux-Saint-Hilaire in the hills of Cognac.

That region gets a tourism campaign of romantic lensing by cinematographer Martin Rit, a really lovely warm treatment of golden light on dusty vineyards that Francophiles are going to lap up.

The casting is golden too, with de Tonquedec a bit of a ringer for Besson, but the film's secret weapon is Belmondo, grandson of French New Wave megastar Jean-Paul Belmondo, the same long nose and plump lips, though playing too much of a buttoned-down corporate type to make the most of his iconic family features.

There is a familiarity to Lie With Me as it treads the same boards of many other queer coming-of-age films, because these tropes of repression are so familiar to many.