We meet Rebecca Cross (Connie Sellecca), a 35-year-old flannel enthusiast with a flawless complexion and unfortunate bangs, when she’s hauled off to jail in handcuffs. Suspenseful music plays as she’s booked — what crime did the mild-mannered cancer researcher commit? For the answer, let us turn to one of Barbra Streisand’s greatest hits: Rebecca is “A Woman in Love.” And she’ll do anything to get Mike (A Martinez) into her world and hold him within, even if it means committing bigamy. It’s a right she defends over and over again.
Rebecca is already married to Jeffrey (Perry King of Inmates: A Love Story), a dashing surgeon. Weeks earlier, he slid a bracelet onto her wrist for their seventh wedding anniversary and proposed a toast: “To Rebecca. I didn’t think it was possible but I love you more today than the day we were married.” And then he is paged to the operating room, a familiar conclusion to their nights together. Her loneliness is accentuated by her father’s deathbed regret at not spending more time with loved ones, a fate he implores her to avoid.
This is a classic Hallmark setup: the wise elder conspiring to make his unhappy offspring stop and smell the roses (or Christmas cookies). But screenwriter Kathleen Rowell (who scripted Raquel Welch’s insensitive Tainted Blood) veers in a different direction, for the roses Rebecca stops to sniff are in the pants of Mike, the first love she left behind half a lifetime ago. They are reunited when she agrees to teach her professor father’s remaining botany course and catalog his research. Mike, newly divorced from a straying ex, is the school’s basketball coach, and old passions reignite after their paths cross on campus.
Moving with the speed of seasoned lesbians, they elope within a month and play house at Rebecca’s inherited country cottage. On weekends she visits Jeffrey in the city, and though she’s spread too thin at home and at work, she doesn’t want to give up either man. “This can work!” she insists to Angie (a note-perfect J. Smith-Cameron), her disapproving best friend. “Men have been doing it for centuries — two wives, two families. Why can’t I?” She spares few thoughts for her clueless husbands, and even her saucier friend Desiree (Patricia Clarkson), a trophy wife and merry adulteress, sees trouble on the horizon. “You’re gonna get your heart broken twice,” Desiree predicts.
Near its final third, there’s a 10 or 15-minute stretch of She Led Two Lives that is surprisingly enjoyable. As Rebecca flits from man to man and near-disaster to near-disaster, lying so frantically that she loses track of her stories (and wedding bands), you are reminded of the madcap Micki & Maude, in which Dudley Moore juggles commitments to Ann Reinking and Amy Irving. But Rowell and director Bill Corcoran (Left Behind II: Tribulation Force) never fully commit to screwball comedy, zigzagging from tearful to cheerful and back again.
Sellecca, looking at times like she wandered by from the set of a contact lens commercial, is never convincingly torn between two loves. Martinez, adept at supporting leading ladies from Farrah Fawcett to Jean Smart, supplies a little sizzle, and King’s jaw was as square as ever, but theirs was not a compelling love triangle. What got me through She Led Two Lives even when it dragged — besides flashbacks to Arrested Development’s take on open relationships (an option the filmmakers don’t consider) — was the sublime Clarkson as Desiree. Immaculately coiffed and manicured, her hand never far from a wine glass, she steals every scene she’s in and knowingly purrs the movie’s best advice: “The worst lies are the ones you tell yourself.”
… But wait, there’s more!
Watching the aforementioned Micki & Maude with my former partner many years ago, I laughed so hard I cried — particularly at its dinosaur scene — and my face ached. Watching it with my wife years later, I barely laughed at all. Was my judgment off then or is my judgment off now? I don’t know, but Micki & Maude is currently on Tubi if you want to judge for yourself. So is Paul Mazursky’s Enemies, A Love Story, a darkly funny take on bigamy adapted from one of my favorite novels by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Streaming and DVD availability
She Led Two Lives hasn’t been released on DVD in the US (what’s available at Amazon is a British import), but you can stream it for free on Plex or YouTube. Please report dead links in the comments below and I’ll try to find replacements.
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Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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