Unfaithful
(2002)
erotic
drama
directed
by : Adrian Lyne
featuring
: Richard Gere - Diane Lane - Olivier Martinez - Erik Per Sullivan - Zeljko
Ivanek
running
time : 2 hour 4 minutes
Diane Lane is a wayward wife and Richard
Gere is her suspicious husband in Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful. Connie (Lane)
leaves her suburban home on an errand, venturing into Manhattan during
a wicked windstorm. On a trash-strewn Soho street, she literally runs into
Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez), a handsome young Frenchman carrying a huge
stack of books. Connie has a bad scrape on her knee, and is unable to get
a cab, so Paul invites her up to his apartment. Paul is quietly flirtatious
as he gives Connie some ice and a bandage for her knee. Connie phones home
and explains to her son, Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan), that she's running
late. Before she leaves, Paul gives her a book of Persian poetry, The Rubaiyat
of Omar Khayyam. She mentions the encounter in passing to Edward (Gere),
her husband, but it's clear that she's obsessing about Paul, and soon she's
back in the city, with a pretext for calling him up. Soon, they are lovers,
and they grow bolder and bolder in their passion. Edward begins to suspect,
and eventually gets a private investigator (Dominic Chianese) to follow
Connie. His worst fears confirmed, Edward decides to confront Paul, a decision
that will come to haunt him. While the screenplay for Unfaithful is credited
to Alvin Sargent and William Broyles Jr. the inspiration for Lyne's film
came from Claude Chabrol's acclaimed 1969 film La Femme Infidele.
A well-appointed movie about a
woman punished for sexual desire? Then it must be Lyne's latest opus about
the perils of pleasure. Rather than a man-eating careerist or a money-strapped
wife-turned-single night prostitute, Unfaithful's degraded female is a
pampered housewife with too much time on her hands and not nearly enough
to occupy her minuscule mind. Adopting a determinedly serious tone meant
to mitigate such preposterous plot conceits as the fateful windstorm and
the undesirability of Gere, Lyne lingers over the "erotic" encounters between
Lane and très français lover Martinez with his usual affinity
for classy soft core, pausing long enough to allow the supporting characters
to deliver clumsy lines clarifying the allegedly deep morality play at
hand. Lane and Martinez do their best to flesh out their repellent non-characters,
and Gere effectively channels most of his smolder into finely contained
rage and pain, but the lead trio is finally done in by Broyles and Sargent's
hopelessly mediocre script as well as Lyne's ham-fisted imagery. Though
men might enjoy the spectacle of the American Gigolo reduced to cuckold,
Unfaithful is hardly the alternative summer movie for intelligent adults
that Lyne and his cohorts wish.