Jan Oliver Lucks

(On Cable TV, March 2021) The number of films that dramatically improve “if you keep watching” is far smaller than you’d think — it’s rare for a twist ending to elevate a film, it’s even rarer for films to shift tones successfully, and it’s even rarer for a documentary to feature a significant third-act swerve. But There Is No I in Threesome is an exception, even if it will test anyone’s patience along the way. At first, what we think we’re seeing is a salacious premise for a selfie-shot film: a young couple planning to wed but separated by distance, agreeing to an open relationship before the wedding clearly identified as the happy ending in their own documentary. Try not to gag at the opening minutes filled with happy-talk about open relationship that desperately sounds like people trying to convince themselves of something. He’s a filmmaker working in Wellington, NZ — she’s an actress working throughout Australasia. They’re both free spirits, and he (clearly the writer-director) can’t stop singing her praises. There are, they assure us, rules to their premarital experiment — except that they’re broken almost immediately. There are reasons for them sleeping with other people. There are procedures to ensure that this is all above-board and risk-free. Predictably, this all blows up. (It’s not that open relationships and/or polyamory can’t work for some people—I’m sure it does—but our two leads here are obviously ill-equipped to handle it.)  But just at the point where most viewers will be thinking variations on “well, what did you expect?” writer/director Jan Oliver Lucks pulls an F for Fake-sized rug from underneath the narrative. What we have been watching is based on true events—his own failed relationship—and the real intention was to shoot footage documenting the premarital openness, but a good chunk of the footage has been re-created with an actress rather than the ex-girlfriend. And, in a further twist, what we have been seeing (even as a dramatic reconstruction) is acknowledged as a very selective and subjective retelling of events from his perspective. It’s not quite a reversal good enough to make us like the result—it’s still annoying, still largely shot using a selfie stick, still overly provocative for its own sake—but it does become a bit more interesting than what it would have been at face value. There Is No I in Threesome is probably the single worst possible film to sing the virtues of non-traditional relationships — but it does become far more interesting as a re-creation that plays with our idea of what’s true, what’s not, and what’s in the middle as performative… especially when people are filming themselves in a bid for other peoples’ attention.