Connie's knees
It's a very windy day. A very windy day. Still, Connie Sumner
(Diane Lane), a happy-enough Westchester County housewife is
determined to go into the city in order to do her errands.
Teetering on her high heels, loaded with packages, she's
struggling to get a cab when boom, she runs smack into a young
man, Paul (Olivier Martinez), who is carrying a stack of old
books. Both go down. They exchange looks. His hair blows across
his face. Her smile flutters. And you have once again entered
the bizarre realm where director Adrian Lyne holds sway, where
all relationships are simultaneously broadly metaphorical, oddly
abstract, and excruciatingly literal.
Connie takes respite from the wind inside Paul's huge Soho
apartment, where she introduces herself to the beautiful,
28-year-old French bookseller as "Constance," because, you know,
the film is called Unfaithful and she will not be
constant at all. Paul is apparently irresistible, casting his
sleepy eyes in her direction and offering her a book off the
many in his collection. In fact, he directs her to the precise
tome of poems that will win her heart, or at least get her
attention, telling her which row, which shelf, which number of
books from the left, and which page she needs to be reading. Oh
my, he seems to know her so well, after only a minute of
dialogue. She blushes and scurries from the apartment. Smitten.
She doesn't mean to be. Connie would really rather head home to
the suburbs, kiss her little kid, and find another, less
self-destructive way to distract herself from her sense that
husband Edward (Richard Gere) is vaguely-but-not-horribly
obsessed with his work and less focused on her than he may once
have been. But no, poor Connie is the female protagonist in an
Adrian Lyne movie, and so, she must suffer.
Though Connie loves Edward and son Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan,
Malcolm in the Middle's Dewey), she can't stop thinking
about Paul. As soon as she walks in the door at home, her knees
become a prominent emblem of her infidelity to come. First, the
maid takes note, proffering a bag of frozen peas. Then Charlie
espies them, celebrating their bloodiness and snapping photos to
show off in class. Even workaholic Edward pays attention,
nodding at her story of how they came about, asking innocently
if the young man who helped her was "good looking." Most
insistently, the camera offers repeated close-ups of Connie's
knees, band-aided or raw, so as to let you know what's on her
mind.
Loosely adapted by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles, Jr. from
Claude Chabrol's La Femme Infidèle, Unfaithful
revisits familiar Lynian themes: much like 9 1/2 Weeks,
Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, and
Lolita, the new film examines the trouble men get into
when women behave too passionately. Lyne also brings to bear his
trademark symbolism (pots boiling, rain pelting windshields,
dogs placidly observing human foibles) and filtered light (and,
as the New York Times reported on 7 May 2002, he can't
just use filtered lenses like everyone else; he has to pump
smoke onto the set, to the point that Diane Lane had to have
oxygen between takes). This isn't to say that perfectionism is a
bad thing. It is to say that Lyne has one trick he likes and for
which he has been rewarded. And he does it again and again.
That trick here is by turns intriguingly complex and
irritatingly reductive. Against her better judgment, Connie (or
Con, as Edward so ominously calls her) lurches into an affair
with Paul. Her first gesture is tentative, her nervousness
palpable -- she takes the train into town, then calls Paul from
a Grand Central payphone, agreeing to come over "for coffee." He
doesn't press her, letting her scurry off a couple of more times
before they actually do the deed, as he sweeps her off her feet
and carries her into the bedroom. (In one seeming twist, the
elevator in Paul's building doesn't work, so you're not
subjected to another of those slam-around-in-the-elevator scenes
for which Lyne is famous.)
Their first tryst appears on screen in fragments, as Connie
recalls it during her train ride back home. She's thrilled,
afraid, and angry, remembering that, when Paul instructed her to
hit him, she did, leading directly to orgasmic frenzy. Back on
the train, she's simultaneously weepy and elated, her hands
fluttering to her flushed face, wiping away tears, as bits of
the afternoon flash for you. The scene is moving, not only
because Connie is so manifestly undone by the experience, so
suddenly aware of her own hunger and desire, but also because
she is so manifestly alone in this awareness. Boy-toy will never
match her excitement or ingenuity. That is, you get the feeling
here that this is not the beginning of a relationship, but the
first step in a building catastrophe, for which Connie will feel
wholly responsible.
But of course, she doesn't know this yet. And the first part of
the film carefully traces Connie's roller-coaster emotions,
punctuated by reckless decisions to go to restaurants where she
might be spotted (most devastatingly, by one of Paul's rancorous
employees, installed just for this plot-devicey function). Her
lack of vision exacerbates your anxiety, because you know where
this is headed, but it makes her sympathetic in a way that most
girls in Lyne's movies are not.
Moreover, he plays games: when she calls him one afternoon
after being waylaid outside his apartment by a couple of
acquaintances (Kate Burton and Margaret Colin), he comes to the
café where they're having coffee. Paul tousles his hair, absorbs
the ladies' admiring looks, then saunters past their table into
the bathroom, where Connie meets him and they share a fast,
ardent stall-encounter. She returns to the table with one button
undone. Oblivious of her breathlessness, the women proceed to
discuss the possibilities of "affairs." One warns that they
always end disastrously, and Connie bites her lip.
Soon she's confessing to Paul that he's the first thing she
thinks of when she wakes up each morning. Well, uh, he likes her
too, though maybe not so much; you won't be surprised (like she
is) that he has other girlfriends. Still, your sympathy gets
stretched when Connie starts behaving like a crazy person, or
more accurately, a character in an Adrian Lyne movie. She almost
crashes her SUV in the rain while zooming to NYC (bad driver!),
forgets to pick up little Charlie at school (bad mom!), and then
gives Paul a gift that Edward once gave her (bad wife, and not
so bright, either!).
It could be that these ill-advised moves indicate Connie's
general conflict over the affair. The film thickly underlines
her capacity for duplicity and also compassion in a montage that
intercuts happy-Connie at Charlie's sunny outdoor birthday
party, and happy-Connie in Paul's dark and sultry bedroom,
arranged in stylish sexual tableaux, sumptuously filmed by Peter
Biziou.
All good things must end. As Connie's actions become
increasingly inexplicable and Edward catches a clue,
Unfaithful abandons her point of view for his. This is
very too bad, because his point of view is odd, to say the
least, and in making this shift, the film appears to equate two
very unequal acts (adultery, and what Edward does). He hires a
detective, a decision that, as Gere pointed out on the
Today show, indicates serious, pre-Paul problems in the
marriage: Edward would rather go to this extreme than have a
conversation with his wife.
On learning the "truth," Edward decides to confront Paul (who
sort of resembles Gere in his more insolent American
Gigolo days), whereupon his jealousy literally makes him
ill, at which point, the film resorts to a very cheap trick (and
it's not even Lyne's usual), taking Edward's unfocused, flailing
perspective ("I. Feel. Ill."). Such visual gimmickry doesn't
really make up for what follows, doesn't make what Edward does
next look plausible, and doesn't excuse sending Connie off to
the edges of the film. Unfaithful quickly descends into a
murky moral relativity, where obsession substitutes for love and
women forgive all.
— 9 May 2002
