Unfaithful


Starring Diane Lane, Richard Gere, Olivier Martinez, Erik Per Sullivan, Chad Lowe Kate Burton, Margaret Colin, Dominic Chianese. Directed by Adrian Lyne.

Edward and Connie Sumner (Gere and Lane) are an outwardly happy middle-aged couple living in a beautiful country home just outside New York City. They have an eight-year-old son Charlie (Sullivan), a dog and a housekeeper. They treat each other well and are in need of nothing. But one day, while in New York shopping during a windstorm, Connie meets a handsome French stranger Paul Martel (Martinez) on a Soho street. Paul offers her a bandaid for her knee scrape, a cup of tea and a book from his extensive collection. She returns on the train back home. But she can't stop thinking of him. She starts making excuses to go to town just to see Paul, and soon her obsession turns into a full blown, intense affair.

When Edward learns that his wife has lied to him, suspicion compels him to hire a detective friend (Chianese) to discover if Connie is cheating on him. Once he finds out, he confronts her lover, only to discover a level of rage within himself that he could never have imagined. Their lives are changed and the question remains whether a marriage so infected by guilt, betrayal and anger can ever be healed?

Director Adrian Lyne has made a career out of steamy sex and infidelity, including Fatal Attraction, 9 1/2 weeks and Indecent Proposal. Unfaithful follows in that tradition, but it deviates in that it is less flashy and more introspective. It is supposed to be the flip side of Fatal Attraction, infidelity from the woman's point of view. Unlike Michael Douglas, who is presented pretty starkly as the bad guy forallowing the psycho career woman to endanger his Reaganesque nuclear family, Connie is presented as a very nice, loving person, and all three of the principal characters are imperfect but reasonable and decent people. The viewer is left to ask why a woman in a "happy" marriage would risk everything for an affair. Unfaithful ably shows that the Sumners "perfect" life is full of routine. We see Connie playing with Charlie, preparing meals in the kitchen, eating quietly together as a family. There's plenty of love, but very little passion. With Paul, Connie gets to take a risk. There is spontaneity and mystery in their relationship. Their sex is not gentle and respectful like with Edward, but often a bit rough and quite passionate. My take is that Connie has everything in her life but passion and excitement, and Paul fills that void for her.

The story unfolds smoothly, and as with many thrillers, there are a few annoying implausibilities, not least of which is Connie's lying to the police about her affair with Paul and them not seemingly able to find anything including Paul's answering machine tape and not a single fingerprint. The resolution is ambiguous and appropriate to the rest of the story.

Diane Lane turns in perhaps her best performance yet. Saddled with a lot of bad films and, shall we say, not particularly stellar acting in them, she has recently been doing very good work. She was great in A Walk On The Moon, and here Lane is able to show vulnerability and remains sympathetic even while risking so much for some excitement. And, I kid you not, Richard Gere is quite good as the decent but rigid husband. Gere specializes in being emotionless, and that works well here, helping to explain Lane's desire for her affair. He convincingly displays his anger later in the film.

I wasn't that big a fan of the Oscar-nominated Fatal Attraction - not a lot of subtlety there. I like this one better. Despite some obvious improbabilities, Unfaithful is less sensationistic (no drowned person rises out of the bathtub), more thoughtful, and the two lead performances make this an interesting adult thriller.




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