Unfaithful

Directed by Adrian Lyne
Written by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles, Jr.
Starring Richard Gere, Olivier Martinez, Diane Lane
USA, 2002

B

In Unfaithful, an adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidele, we have another addition to the collection of the hip suburbia-bashers, and it’s getting to the point where the word “suburbia” conjures sickness in my stomach – so the filmmakers have finally achieved that correlation between Middle America and boredom that they must have sought from the beginning. But the city is still vibrant with whirling trash, pungent and beautifully designed, and hot French book dealers for a nice, leggy woman like Diane Lane to bump into during a wind storm while she’s carrying her son’s birthday party favors through Soho. The dealer’s name is Paul Martel and, apart from his off-putting teeth, the Olivier Martinez caught in the role exhibits a sort of minimalist acting ability and zero charm. The husband is the evergreen Richard Gere, and when he pulls a string of fake tears and sniffles out of his butt, it is as you would expect – strangely unconvincing, despite his being of a more quiet and sensitive, and seemingly more publicly dignified, breed of movie stars. Amidst this abyss of relatively stinky pretense, we have Diane Lane – nice, leggy, and wonderful enough to cram in all the truth we need for a Hollywood affair such as this. As the suburban mother/wife Connie, who sleeps with the idiot boho book dealer and likes it, she resuscitates what might well have been dead (and sordid) on arrival.

To the credit of much-maligned director Adrian Lyne (and writers Alvin Sargent and William Broyles, Jr.), Unfaithful breathes with a freedom from the Freudianness of other films dying to explain odd behavior, films like his take on Lolita. Here we have a woman in an idyllic home situation, firmly established in the first scene with cute nicknames and fart jokes confirming marital bliss. We’re given no explanation about the depths of unconscious twistedness within this woman – why she would cheat on her affectionate man-of-11-years-and-counting – and it’s more satisfying that way, even though our knee-jerk reaction may be to diagnose her with rich-lady maladies like restlessness or sexual neglect. We get to see a lot of her little kid who, as in all movies featuring pre-schoolers and Disney-type animals, is too sweet to be genuine, is mothered inaccurately, and ends up being cinematically exploited for his cuteness. Moments of banality seem like attempts to compensate for an overall resistance to easily attained, easily explained emotion. But, ultimately, the manipulative use of the child actor doesn’t give us a convenient route out; we don’t develop anything beyond a mere pang of disgust for the mother who backstabs her husband and – even worse – leaves her child at school while clutching her lover’s waist. Either it’s a new selfishness in cinema or a ludicrous lack of manipulation skills.

In this package of stardust infidelity is the obligatory juxtaposition of New York suburbs and New York City, which is fundamentally old hat but not officially lame thanks to cinematographer Peter Biziou (The Truman Show, Mississippi Burning) and editor Anne V. Coates (Out of Sight, Lawrence of Arabia). When you have a creative team like this, one that consists of two glorious cinematic histories, you can ease up on Adrian Lyne’s misdeeds (about which many may argue: Flashdance, 9 ˝ Weeks, Indecent Proposal). There’s something about Coates’ style, as it has evolved or adapted in recent years, that is individualistic and very distinctive, so much so that her latest work has become a part of the overall look of the films she’s been involved with, whereas, in the past, editing may have only been associated with a feel. We may not be able to detect an Anne V. Coates film from the get-go, but when her name appears in the titles, we might have a sense of recognition or hindsight bias. Now she has brought the flavor she developed in the Steven Soderbergh Hollywood movies, with those chic punch line cuts, to Unfaithful. For his part, Biziou photographs with a fashionable elegance that doesn’t look flashy, with emotion that’s not overwrought, and, refreshingly enough, he makes no clear visual distinction between city and suburbs that would have us rolling our eyes.

Certainly this is Hollywood at work: this New York is a dream of a place, a mousetrap for adulterous persons who just happen to bump into friends and acquaintances all over the crowded city (all of the movie’s side-dish characters are by-products of clichés from the history of time). The most thought-provoking (and irresponsible) Unfaithful ever gets is in a scene where the French lover blatantly attacks and rapes Connie after she vows to end the relationship. For several moments he is raping her, as he tears off her clothes against her will, and then the scene begins to straddle a thin line when we see a shot of Connie unzipping Paul’s pants. When a bloody violent act finally interrupts Lyne’s airy, rhapsodic tension, and the director wants to amp up the urgency and reel in the net, we are left with monotony, hollowness, and broken-record expressions of regret. There were so many spots at which the movie should have ended but didn’t, and, though Lyne may have wanted profundity, he achieves something much better in the first half of the film, a rhythm he unfortunately abandons.

The best of everyone’s talents is represented in the most impressive sequence, during which Connie reminds herself of the afternoon spent in a tug-of-war between seduction and responsibility. Lane, one of those gifted facial contortionists, starts in anguish and transfers to infantile pleasure; editor, cinematographer, and director contribute and are in tune with her performance. In a move that is out of sync with Adrian Lyne’s reputation, the sex scene is not lengthened by redundant nudity or simulated intercourse; we see it all mirrored in Ms. Lane’s face as she squirms on the train ride home, and when, in an ideal world, she is nominated for an Oscar, it would be advisable for them to screen this clip during the ceremony as validation. Under my breath I gave the film the hasty verdict of “well-made” and Lane the rightful praise of “Stunning.”

By Andrew Chan [JUNE 18, 2002]