by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a 2002 movie called Unfaithful that I had recorded off Lifetime on June 24 (just
one day after John Primavera, my friend and home-care client of nearly 30
years, died suddenly) starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane, who reunited for a
much better film called Nights in Rodanthe just six years later. Unfaithful was a U.S. remake of a 1969 French movie called La Femme
Infidèle (“The Unfaithful Wife”), written
by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles, Jr. from the original French screenplay
by Claude Chabrol (who also directed the French version); this one was directed
by Adrian Lyne, who despite his réclame from having made Fatal Attraction in 1987 hasn’t directed a film in the 10 years since Unfaithful (though his imdb.com page lists something called Back
Roads as being in pre-production). It’s the
sort of movie that’s so evidently trying for Seriousness with a capital “S”
that it’s heartbreaking to see it go awry at almost every turn. After a
prologue of boringly banal suburban domesticity, it starts in New York City on
a windy day (which makes it rather appropriate watching in the wake of Hurricane or Superstorm or
whatchamacallit Sandy), in which suburban housewife Connie Sumner (Diane Lane)
takes a bad fall on the street and is rescued by Paul Martel (Olivier
Martinez), who runs a seedy little used bookstore and apparently lives in a
flat above the store in the same building, and takes a lot of his stock home
with him since the place is virtually filled with bookshelves containing such
treasures as a first-edition copy of Jack London’s White Fang with the original dust jacket (did they have dust jackets back then?) which he proudly tells her
he bought for $1.50 and is worth $4,000. Paul is your typical movie French
seducer with the bad accent — he fractures English even worse than Charles
Boyer (whom he’s obviously mimicking) ever did — and Connie is inexplicably
drawn to his combination of gorgeous looks and bad attitude.
We’ve already seen
the suburban domesticity she’s longing for an escape from — hubby Ed (Richard
Gere) and 10-year-old son Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan) in a big, sterile house —
and Ed’s having career problems which are never quite explained (at least in
the Lifetime version — it’s clear some major surgery was done on this movie to
make it fit for basic cable: the “memorable quotes” section on imdb.com
includes Ed chewing out Connie with the F-word after he’s discovered her affair
with Paul — “How you fucked him over and over and over? You lied to me over and
over and over. … You threw it all away like it was nothing. For what? To a
fucking kid!” — which of course we heard neither hide nor hair of in this
bowdlerized Lifetime version) but we’re told briefly that he owns a fleet of
trucks and he’s recently bought 200 more of them but he can’t run them because
some authority has imposed a “suspension” on him that he’s having to fight in
court. Maybe the original French version was better (though it’s not like I’m
actively going to seek it out) but the U.S. one is all too soaked in America’s
peculiarly mixed attitude towards sex, in which we’re at once titillated by and
condemnatory of those who “cheat” (itself an awfully loaded term for something
that’s often a simple, basic expression of our humanity!), resulting in a movie
like this in which the guilt feelings of the characters (the American ones, at
any rate) are part of the plot. About the one thing Lyne, Sargent and Broyles
get right is the clash between
the French and the American attitudes towards extra-relational sex: Paul thinks
it’s no big deal and nobody’s business but his and his partners’ whom he has
sex with; Ed not only guesses his wife is having an affair but hires a private
detective to tail her and take surveillance photos of her and Paul together;
and even Connie gets ridiculously possessive and flails at Paul and his
alternate girlfriend (Murielle Arden) when she catches them necking in between
the shelves in his bookstore.
The movie rambles on for about half its running
time with Connie making more and more preposterous excuses for getting away to
be with Paul, building up the suspense over how Ed is going to find out for sure
about the affair and what’s going to happen when the two men confront each
other — which finally occurs in Paul’s upstairs apartment, where Lyne’s camera
gives us a shot from Ed’s point of view as his gaze travels through the studio
room, alights on the bed where his wife made love with that person, then notices a crystal snow-globe, picks it
up and says, “Rosebud” — oops, wrong movie. Ed recognizes the snow-globe, asks
Paul where he got it, and when Paul says, “Your wife gave it to me,” Ed gets
furious, says, “I gave it to her!,”
picks it up and clobbers Paul in the head with it (and of course Lyne can’t
resist copping Orson Welles’ famous shot of the snow-globe hitting the floor
and rolling towards the camera in extreme close-up, though this time it doesn’t shatter — it has to remain intact to set up one last
plot twist towards the end). It’s the sort of movie assault where it looks like
Paul just suffered a light tap on the head, enough to draw blood but hardly
life-threatening, but we’re told
the blow was instantly fatal — and, as in Gere’s star-making film, American
Gigolo, the mid-film murder blasts this
movie from the realm of the merely mediocre to the out-and-out campy-bad. We’re
rooting (at least I was!) for Ed
to come to his senses and call 911 — obviously he’s better off being charged
with assault than ultimately arrested for murder — and he actually picks up
Paul’s phone, presses the “9” and then the “1,” but idiotically draws back from
pressing “1” again and instead starts wiping every surface he’s touched to
avoid leaving fingerprints. He wraps Paul’s body up in a carpet, seals it with
duct tape (he’s beginning to look as if he’s auditioning for America’s
Stupidest Criminals), and drags it into the
building’s elevator — which sticks — and when he finally gets himself and the
body out of the building he’s accosted by a passer-by (a witness!). He packs the body into the trunk of his car and
eventually disposes of it in what looks like either a construction site or a
dump — only it’s found and the police start investigating. The film ends with
Ed and Connie having been brought back together by her husband’s murdering her
lover; they’re sitting in their car (with their son in the back seat, maybe
asleep, maybe awake) and as the film ends they talk about relocating to an
island, assuming other identities, and hiding out for the rest of their lives —
an annoyingly inconclusive ending which Lyne insisted on.
The studio (20th
Century-Fox, producing in partnership with companies called Regency and Epsilon
— that’s right, this isn’t a “B”-movie, it’s an “E”-movie!) wanted it to end
with Ed getting out of the car — which is parked in front of a police station —
and turning himself in, which would have made a lot more sense both dramatically and morally; for once a
studio was right about a movie and its director was wrong! There’s certainly
some novelty value in Unfaithful,
if only because we expect that in a movie about adultery with Richard Gere as
the star he’s going to be the cuckolder instead of the cuckoldee, but the moral
attitudes of the story are all wrong, Olivier Martinez’s English accent is a
thing of ugliness and a horror to behear, and Adrian Lyne could give the usual
Lifetime hacks lessons in how to ruin a movie by overdirection: in one scene Ed
is shown getting off the commuter train at Grand Central Station, and there’s
none of the pushing and shoving and jockeying for position we’ve seen in just
about every other movie showing this sort of scene. Instead, the passengers,
all virtually identically dressed males in ugly suits, get off the train in
unison with the smooth, well-rehearsed precision of a Busby Berkeley chorus
line. What’s most interesting in Unfaithful is how its moral attitudes exemplify the sexual
counter-revolution: in the 1930’s a plot like this would mostly likely have
ended with the woman (not her
husband!) killing the lover and suffering picturesquely before she’s taken away
and punished in the final reels; in the 1970’s movies like An
Unfinished Woman took this basic situation
and presented adultery as a form of women’s liberation from the stultifying
reality of a suburban marriage; by 2002 the pendulum had swung again and the
story is once again ridden with guilt and angst (in what Sargent and Broyles obviously thought was irony, Ed kills Paul just before Connie
leaves a message on Paul’s phone, which Ed hears, saying she’s going to break
off the affair because “I just can’t do this anymore”) and, despite his
murderous overreaction, our sympathies are clearly with the husband.
