Unfaithful

(Adrian Lyne, USA, 2002)

The remaking of European arthouse classics is a growing and worrying trend in English-language cinema. I daresay that many viewers of Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful will be unaware that it is based on Claude Chabrol's La Femme infidèle (1969) unless they stay for the end credits.

But even those who know the original will have hard a time figuring out exactly what spirit of the original Lyne was inspired by and tried to preserve.

Like many Chabrol films, La Femme infidèle is a steely dissection of the bourgeois family unit, its manners and codes. It takes a simple plot of adultery and its consequences, and uses it as a microscopic lens through which to reveal what happens when those everyday codes are disturbed.

In Unfaithful, virtually all of this has disappeared. Now it is only the story of a fling. Connie (Diane Lane) is stuck in an acceptable but unexciting marriage. She loves her kids, and gets along well with her husband, Edward (Richard Gere). But her dreams of a sexy romance are stoked by a chance encounter with the smouldering (and, of course, French) Paul (Olivier Martinez).

Lyne, no doubt tired of being mocked as the man who once gave us Flashdance (1983), has recently tried to steer his career into high seriousness. After his middling version of Lolita (1997), he turns to this starkly dramatic tale. No longer aiming for the hysteria-tinged thrills of Fatal Attraction (1987), he instead concentrates moodily on faces, hands, objects, textures.

But, beyond the pleasure of seeing Lane and Gere in fine acting form, there is nothing thoughtful going on in Unfaithful.

Chabrol's original paid homage to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) in its evocation of scatological imagery – a sign of everything mucky and repressed in the middle-class home. Lyne begins Unfaithful with a flurry of toilet references that suggest his grasp of this level of meaning. But, like much else in the movie, it is left pitiably undeveloped.

MORE Lyne: Indecent Proposal

© Adrian Martin July 2002