A literature teacher seeks justice against a surgeon she claims date raped her in Lies And Deceit.Courtesy of Netflix
Notably, two of the recent batch of docu-series about fraud and scam artists feature young women. In both Inventing Anna and The Dropout, women are the scoundrels who concoct a deceit and profit from it, before being exposed and charged with crimes. Even Bad Vegan, currently at the top of the most-watched Netflix productions, initially presents restaurateur Sarma Melngailis as the victim of manipulation and coercion, but ultimately questions her account of things.
Extrapolate what you want from the surge in the genre’s popularity, but there is something toxic about the way the key women figures are presented. On the one hand, especially with The Dropout, and its treatment of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, there is a sense that the central figure only did what men do – exaggerate and boast – and she is treated unfairly when caught out.
But, over all, there is an underlying theme of suspicion about women. The suspicion theme suggests that women are inherently motivated to create fantasies, especially a fantasy existence, and are unreliable. That’s part of the schadenfreude in the experience of watching these series – viewers enjoy watching foolish people get suckered by women who, clearly, could not be trusted.
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Lies and Deceit (streams Netflix) is an antidote to this troubling trend. Recently arrived, this six-part thriller from Spain (in Spanish with English subtitles) is a mature, smart study of a woman being put in a position where her reliability comes under attack and she doesn’t know where to put her trust.
It’s about Laura (Angela Cremonte), a school teacher who is about to separate, amicably, from her husband Ivan (Miquel Fernandez). He’s packing up and moving on, and she goes to work. The first hint that something substantial is unfolding is in the class she teaches. It’s a poetry class and the topic is the work of Sylvia Plath. She asks a young man in her class to unpack the Plath poem, and he can’t.
Thing is, she knows that boy’s father, a widower and surgeon at the local hospital, Xavier (Javier Rey). After some innocent flirtation between the two – they are both adults, this isn’t about teenagers playing games – she has dinner with him. We see the date proceed well. Then Laura wakes up the next morning feeling unwell but also with a sense that she had sex with Xavier and didn’t agree to it. At first she thinks it’s a bad dream. She trusted Xavier and, besides, her sister Cata (Manuela Velasco) is a nurse who works with him and she’s never heard anything negative about the man.
What happened comes back to her in fragments. Xavier came back to her place, but only to chat and call a taxi before leaving. But the fragments become more sinister. “It’s like it happened to somebody else,” she tells Cata before finally going to the police and accusing her date of rape. The police are wary. Xavier is a surgeon with an impeccable reputation. There is no physical evidence of rape.
When she returns to work, in a scene that’s memorable and chilling, Xavier turns up in her classroom, telling her quietly that there’s been a misunderstanding. “You never told me you didn’t want to,” he says, asserting they had consensual sex. Laura begins to doubt herself. But, fed up with the police inaction and in a rage, she posts her accusations on social media.
The thriller, adapted from a British series called Liar, but much more focused and subtle, toys a bit with the viewer. There are suggestions that Laura might be unreliable, a bit too entranced with herself and lonely. Someone in her extended family asks Cata, “Do the police know about the other time?” Meanwhile, Cata’s own motives for supporting Laura are shown to be dubious as a secret about her main relationship is revealed before the end of the first episode.
The series is no masterpiece, nor was it meant to be. It’s a tightly knit crime thriller, mainly from the perspective of a woman who isn’t believed about what happened to her. The tone is dark and moody, the more so for being set in a sunny place, in a small bourgeois community. Part of its power in is the fact that it teems with ordinary, seemingly decent people, a place where a woman is constantly made to feel guilty about her accusation against that nice doctor.
In sum, it’s about Laura trying to resist being gaslit. As a thriller it sets up a false narrative with a few red herrings, and ends up being about a false narrative constructed to make its main character distrust herself. She is being scammed, but in a way far more relevant than any entry in the distressing glut of shows about women who scam others.
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