When most people would be arriving in Hollywood, Steven Soderbergh is leaving. Instead of using his victory at the Cannes Film Festival to swap his apartment in the San Fernando Valley for a condo at the Marina - the first in a long chain of real estate transactions that would inexorably end with an estate in Beverly Hills or Bel Air - the year-old writer and director of ''Sex, Lies and Videotape'' is tossing a duffle bag into his Rambler. His destination is Charlottesville, Va. The saga of ''Sex, Lies and Videotape,'' which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, seems more daydream than reality, a fairy tale to lull oneself to sleep: What if you made a complex, serious little film about the sexual impulses of men and women and how they deceive themselves and each other? What if your answering machine was stuffed with messages from those executives even before you took your movie to Cannes and became the youngest director ever to win first prize?

Adulting can be hard. Watch the video. Irene, a thirty-something housewife with a successful husband and a young son, has her life thrown in a spin when she becomes attracted to Billy, a member of a landscape crew outside her Chapelle, a sexy and mysterious painter, uses the art of seduction to pit her half-brother and his best friend against each other in an act of revenge against her abusive father. A dangerous love triangle ensues.

Adulting can be hard. Watch the video. What are adult love affairs? Two couples meet and fall in love, lose sight of each other in the confusion and end up pulling through.