"Unfaithful" is indeed about a great and powerful if illicit love affair. But it's not the thing between Diane Lane and some creepy French male model.
No, it's between the director Adrian Lyne and his great hit "Fatal Attraction," whose magic he is desperately trying to re-create. Structurally as well as topically, they are similar: An indiscretion by a seemingly perfect mate not only causes great anguish to all concerned, but also opens the door of the universe to admit irrational chaos. What begins as the sheer fun of a glandular exchange seminar escalates rapidly to violence. Then too, the demon in all this, in both films, is the hated Single Person, font of all evil. There's no sense, in either film, that adultery may be caused as much by the dynamics of the marriage as by the availability of a handsome new bedmate.
Diane Lane and Richard Gere star in "Unfaithful."
(20th Century Fox)
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But here's the difference: In "Fatal Attraction," so clever was the script and so sympathetic the performances that you effortlessly believed. Here, one believes absolutely nothing. It's all fraud. You don't believe Diane Lane, who is beautiful but as inert as depleted uranium, playing a nominally happy, prosperous housewife in Westchester County named Connie Sumner. You don't believe Richard Gere as her hubby, a powerful armored car executive (why that? No answer forthcomes), who is staggered to encounter the reality of the title.
And least of all do you believe that Connie could fall for the sleazy brie-sucking lounge lizard named Paul Martel, played at warp-creep drive by a Frenchy face-man named Olivier Martinez, with that oh-so-Eurotrashy scruff of beard and that tumbling froth of mane. He's like a junior G-man Fabio wannabe.
Not only don't you believe in them – I never really believed in John Wayne either – but you don't care about them. They're pampered, preening, self-important narcissists; they live for nothing except what they've got or new sensations. No one is remotely sympathetic or rational, or makes hard choices. They simply, universally, do what they want.
Watch how Lyne plays the texture of the relationship between Connie and the Frenchman, the heat of which is meant to boil the brew that is the movie. Martinez's Martel is so icky with her: He's crowding, touching, breathing on her neck, doing subtly aggressive, destructive things to her. The poor woman would feel invaded simply by being in the same room with this masher. While she sleeps, he magic-marks her with a cartoon, strategically placed to alert her husband. Everything he does is hostile, under the thin gauze of eroticism. He's pushing her, crowding her, stroking her, muttering whispers into her ear. Yeah, women like that a lot – in men's fantasies.
The problem here is: How do you photograph that sexual attraction between humans? That is to say: How do you take pictures of hot? If you film it straight, you have produced pornography and need a Web site for marketing. If you do it metaphorically, in the old Hollywood style, you have a movie full of laughably obvious symbols, like crashing surf and trains plunging into tunnels. Lyne choses the worst of both, fusing soft-core sexual imagery with the kind of old Hollywood vocabulary of smoldering glares, deep breaths, yearning stares into middle distance.
But to do this demands one thing: chemistry.
Think of the great cases of coming down with the hots in the movie past. No surprise it's a film noir specialty, but not entirely. When Fred MacMurray first sees Barbara Stanwyck come down the steps in "Double Indemnity," and the two make eye contact, cities burn, hearts break, the world shifts on its axis. They are the damned from that moment onward and you feel it to your atomic structure. The same is so between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner in "Body Heat," and how. And even in the nutty-wacky "There's Something About Mary" the filmmakers had the elementary skill to make us believe in the totality of Ben Stiller's lunacy of love, because that was the linchpin on which the film depended.
That bolt of yearning is not here. Nothing's here. Lane and Martinez ape the mannerisms of desire, but they're acting from the outside in, not the inside out. You don't feel something simmering toward conflagration inside either of them. I don't think Lane the actress even likes Martinez the actor. She remains a cipher, whose psychology never makes sense; he remains a face-man, whose secret passion appears to be himself and nothing in the external world.
None of this is helped in the least by Lyne's insistence on enmeshing it in that crudely symbolic universe. When Connie and Paul first meet on a SoHo street, the agent of fate is a powerful wind – recite after me, "An ill wind blows no good" – which, after pausing to reveal her legs, shoves her into the Frenchman with a pile of books in his hand, literally entwining them in the first second. You could wait a thousand years for such a thing to happen. Two seconds later he – strange Frenchman in the big city – invites her up to wash the blood off her knees. She says no but . . . she can't find a cab. So up she goes, and the next thing you know, he's giving her a book of poetry. Mon dieu, poetry! Does that still work anywhere in the world? A few days later, they're snuggling like worms in an apple. But why? The screenplay, by William Broyles Jr. and Alvin Sargent, two old pros who should know better, can't give either a coherent personality or any charm at all. She's vaporous, he's predatory.
Meanwhile, Gere is moping because she administers the affair with kamikaze stupidity and he can't help but blunder into it. Meanwhile, as the movie drags on, it's interrupted now and then with hot flashes of quasi-porn, such as the quickie in the loo of a hip coffee bar. The procedure looks so hard on the back it's hard to believe anybody could get through it, even with Diane Lane!
When the movie turns toward violence – here, by the way, it departs in tone entirely from "La Femme Infidele," the '69 Claude Chabrol film that was its inspiration, by turning Chabrol's frightening coldbloodedness into a less blameworthy act of temporary insanity – it becomes truly ridiculous. First of all, the act that generates the new plot twist is on its face unbelievable, and not merely as an unbelievable outgrowth of character but as an act of physical trauma. The last 40 minutes then become strictly standard-issue cliche: Someone is moving something and . . . the elevator jams. There's an accident and the trunk pops open. All these things are arbitrary; they don't spring from the plot or the character, but are simply imposed on the events to ratchet up the suspense level several notches.
In the end, "Unfaithful" leaves you dispirited and grumpy: All that money spent, all that talent wasted, all that time gone forever, and for what? It's an ill movie that bloweth no man to good.
UNFAITHFUL (R, 124 minutes) – Contains scenes of sexual contact and one scene of bloody violence. At area theaters.
