A Place Called Truth Reviews

A PLACE CALLED BOGUS CARNALITY, more like it. Every aspect of this romance-on-the-range is so muted that the overt bad taste of the RED SHOES DIARIES looks frankly appealing by comparison. Pampered rancher's daughter Lizzie Callahan (Audie England) yearns for off-limits love with lowly cowpoke Kyle (Chris Browning), even though her wealthy daddy, Hank Callahan (Brion James), wants her to marry someone more "suitable." Meanwhile, bisexual new-gal-in-town Rita (Jacqueline Lovell) buys a run-down bar and orchestrates a revenge plot against Lizzie. Callahan has Kyle fired and severely beaten for messing around with his Lizzie, and meddling Rita nurses him back to health. When Kyle has recovered sufficiently, Rita seduces him and has incriminating pictures taken. Meanwhile, thinking Kyle simply abandoned her, Lizzie mends her heart in New Orleans, where she's wooed by an alcoholic, former football star. Lizzie and her scheming parents eventually converge on Rita's dive for a night of reckoning, during which we learn why Rita has been nursing such a vicious grudge against the prairie heiress. Though the film is filled attractive players, everyone's speech is oddly garbled. And it delivers neither substantive drama nor the sexy moments of splendor in the sagebrush you'd expect, given its pretensions to Southwestern Gothic. The end result is less Faulkner-on-horseback than Helen Gurley Brown in the bunkhouse.