May 10, 2002 | Connie Sumner (Diane Lane) is an attractive and affluent suburbanite with a maturely handsome husband (Richard Gere), a sweetly precocious school-age son (Erik Per Sullivan of TV’s Malcolm in the Middle), a spacious home overlooking a photogenic lake, and a job – something to do with organizing charity auctions – that obviously allows her to keep her own hours. But since she’s the central character in a movie titled Unfaithful, not Uneventful, the poor dear is terribly discontented.
She doesn’t appreciate the extent of her dissatisfaction until she’s literally swept off her feet during what appears to be a gale-force windstorm on the streets of Manhattan’s Soho district. Paul (Olivier Martinez), a hunky French rare-books dealer, just happens to live in an apartment two floors above where Connie takes a tumble. He invites her upstairs, so she can tend to her minor wounds, have a cup of tea – and maybe sample more of his hospitality. She accepts his offer, but leaves before anything the least bit improper occurs.
Trouble is, she goes back to see the young man – just to say thanks, mind you, since she’s a very polite lady – and she can’t help noting that she enjoys the view. And when she returns again? Let’s just say that the third time is charm.
Connie and Paul throw themselves headlong into the sort of sensually charged and deliriously reckless affair that we’ve come to expect in a movie directed by Adrian Lyne. That is, we get a lot of acrobatic grappling, artfully entwined limbs, sex in public places – a restaurant and, during a Jacques Tati revival double bill, a movie theater – and cheery, bleary-eyed dishevelment.
It’s all too good, and much too hot, to last. And not at all surprisingly, it doesn’t. Because even though Edward, Connie’s husband, devotes most of his attention to running an armored-truck business, he isn’t entirely oblivious to telltale signs. To paraphrase a ‘60s pop tune, when he sees no welcome look in Connie’s eyes when he reaches for her, he suspects that, hey, maybe she’s lost that loving feeling.
Unfaithful was adapted by screenwriters Alvin Sargent and Williams Broyles Jr. from La Femme Infidele, a 1968 thriller by Claude Chabrol, perhaps the only French filmmaker who’s ever had more of a jones for Alfred Hitchcock than the late, great Francois Truffaut. I haven’t seen the original in three decades, but I do recall that Chabrol spun his scenario with his trademark cool, calculated perversity, all the better to gradually lure us into accepting, even condoning, a crime of passion as an expression of love.
Lyne and his writers recycle many of the same plot elements, but their version is at once more graphic and less electric, somehow managing to seem pallid and plodding even when its most attractive characters are in various stages of undress. Despite a few fiery flashes of hot-bloodedness, Unfaithful has several interminable stretches where you’re aware of nothing but the passing of time and the somberness of tone.
Much as he did in Fatal Attraction and 9 ½ Weeks, Lyne merges emotional grit, fashion-magazine gloss and shabby-chic grunge while following a not-so-innocent protagonist on a plunge into down-and-dirty raunch.
The best scene in the movie arrives early, as Connie savors flashbacks of her first close encounter with Paul. Images of frenzied, almost sadomasochistic lovemaking in the Soho apartment are intercut with close-ups that register a rapid-fire array of emotions – lust, amusement, fear, embarrassment – flashing across Connie’s face as she takes the train home to the suburbs. Everything about the sequence, from the precise details of undressing to the giddy exuberance of uninhibited sex, is pure Lyne.
Abruptly, however, Connie comes to her senses, races to the bathroom of the passenger car and tries to rinse away all traces of her illicit afternoon. The moment is blunt-instrument clumsy and, worse, mood-shatteringly comical. Unfortunately, that also is pure Lyne.
Throughout Unfaithful, Lane maintains her dignity, even while she’s frantically dabbing herself with long swaths of toilet paper, and never loosens her grip on the audience’s sympathy. She’s very good at conveying a sense of thrilled amazement, suggesting that Connie can’t quite believe that, at her age, she’s still capable of such wild and wanton behavior.
To be sure, Lane isn’t really that old, even though Edward and Connie are described in the press kit as “a middle-aged couple” (which, in Hollywood-speak, usually indicates people ready for AARP membership), and even thought the actress likely is no longer young enough to be a leading lady for Woody Allen. But Lane is totally persuasive as a woman who’s been around long enough to be taken for granted by her husband, yet remains sufficiently vital and alluring to attract the serious attention of a younger, studlier boy-toy.
Gere gives an aptly understated, implosive performance, and Martinez hits all the right notes in a role that calls for little more than poses and appearances. But the movie, such as it, belongs mostly to Lane, who memorably plays Connie as a woman caught in the throes of something that’s not so much a fatal attraction as a fearsome addiction. She can’t get enough, until things go too far.
