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Yachta Yachta Yachta
Peter Bogdanovich charts a course through an old-time Hollywood scandal.
-Ryan Godfrey

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May 9-15, 2002

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His Cheatin' Art

THE RECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: Lane and Martinez kick back.

Adrian Lyne takes on infidelity one more time in Unfaithful.

Unfaithful

by Cindy Fuchs

UnfaithfulDirected by Adrian Lyne. A 20th Century Fox release. Opens Friday at area theaters.

It’s a windy day, and Connie Sumner (Diane Lane), a happy-enough suburban housewife, is determined to go into the city (that would be New York) in order to do her errands. Teetering on her high heels, loaded with packages, she’s struggling to get a cab when boom, she runs smack into a young man, Paul (Olivier Martinez), who is carrying a stack of old books. Both go down. And you have once again entered the bizarre world of director Adrian Lyne, at once broadly metaphorical, oddly abstract, and painfully literal.

Connie takes respite from the wind inside Paul's huge SoHo apartment, where she introduces herself to the beautiful, 28-year-old French bookseller as "Constance" -- you know, because the film is called Unfaithful and she will not be constant at all. Paul eyes her lustfully, but restrains himself seductively, applying ice and then Band-Aids to her scraped knees. He gives her a book of poems, casts his sleepy eyes in her direction, and poor Connie's smitten.

She doesn't mean to be. She loves husband Edward (Richard Gere) and son Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan, Malcolm in the Middle's Dewey), but can't seem to stop thinking about Paul, even back home. Charlie loves the bloody knees, and takes photos to show off in class. Even workaholic Edward takes note of them, as does the camera: The knees appear in repeated close-up, so as to let you know what's on her mind.

Loosely adapted by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles from Claude Chabrol's La Femme Infidèle, Unfaithful revisits familiar Lyne themes; like 9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal and Lolita, the new film examines the trouble men get into when women behave too passionately. Connie lurches into an affair with Paul, following an encounter that she recalls during her ride home, such that she recalls the sex scene (including the critical moment when, guilt-ridden and angry, she hits him when he tells her to, surprising herself into ecstatic spasms) intercut with shots on the train, where she's simultaneously weepy and elated, her hands fluttering to her flushed face.

Though she feels conflicted, Con (as Edward calls her) starts to conjure reasons to go into town, where she spends long afternoon hours with Paul, arranged in filtered light and stylish sexual tableaux (sumptuously filmed by Peter Biziou). The first part of the film carefully traces Connie's roller coaster emotions, exacerbated by reckless forays with her beau to cafes where friends and acquaintances inevitably spot her.

As Connie's actions become increasingly inexplicable and Edward catches a clue, Unfaithful abandons her point of view for his. He decides to confront Paul (who rather resembles Gere in his American Gigolo days), whereupon his jealousy literally makes him ill. Here the film resorts to a very cheap trick, taking Edward's unfocused, flailing perspective, as if this visual makes his whacked-out next action comprehensible. Hardly. Unfaithful here plummets into Lyne's usual netherworld of moral relativity, where obsession substitutes for love and women forgive all.