Desire on Videotape: Revisiting Samantha Lang’s Audacious

It must have felt audacious indeed to programme the only short film Samantha Lang has ever made at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival some thirty years ago. Not merely because the film was titled Audacious, but because the cultural memory of the scandal provoked by Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) was still raw. Lang’s film, in its own quiet way, ventured even further.

Audacious traces the intimate inner life of a woman frustrated by her husband’s emotional and sexual inattentiveness. Seeking fulfilment elsewhere—but pointedly not through infidelity—she slips into a realm of fantasy, enabled by an unusually candid couple who send her bespoke VHS recordings. These tapes allow her to explore desire privately, secretly. Lang observes this descent with a cool, unblinking gaze, acutely aware that secrets, left to ferment, eventually surface.

The film is inseparable from its technological moment. The solitary television set in the family living room, the whirr of the VHS player—the magnétoscope, as the French would say—becomes both portal and trap. Who hasn’t been caught watching something they shouldn’t? This was a fleeting moment of freedom, suspended between the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the digital age dissolved secrecy altogether, allowing everything to be watched anywhere—often far more than we ever wished to see.

When the husband eventually discovers the tapes, his reaction is neither rage nor moral panic, but a clumsy, misguided devotion. In an attempt to save his marriage, he tries to recreate one of his wife’s fantasies in real life. The result is devastating. What thrives in imagination collapses under the weight of reality, exposing a fundamental misunderstanding. Fantasies are not rehearsals. They are mental constructions—often involving strangers, other selves, other lives. They are escapes, coping mechanisms, ways of continuing without detonating everything we know. In that sense, fantasy is not something to suppress but something to recognise, even to protect.

Lang’s film arrives at a truth cinema has long circled but rarely articulates with such precision: fantasies are not blueprints. They are often safest when left untouched. From this insight emerges the film’s quietly unsettling question—what do we really want?—a question Audacious poses without judgement and refuses to answer for us.

For a filmmaker’s sole short work, that lingering provocation is no small achievement.