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Connie and Edward
Sumner (played by Diane Lane and Richard Gere) are a seemingly happily married
couple living in suburban affluence with their nine-year-old son Charlie (Sullivan).
Nothing is particularly
wrong with their marriage, but when Connie encounters Gallic charmer Paul (Martinez)
by chance while shopping in New York's SoHo, she succumbs to the temptation of
an affair.
But affairs, as
one of Connie's friends remarks, "always end disastrously" - at least
they do in Lyne's moralistic universe.
Connie and Paul
make love with wild abandon in his artfully disordered apartment, the corridor
outside, a restaurant, and a cinema. Unsurprisingly, Edward senses that something
is amiss and hires a private detective to follow his wife.
Catastrophic events
predictably ensue - but not necessarily the ones you would imagine.
"Unfaithful"
is a remake of Claude Chabrol's masterly 1969 thriller "La Femme Infidèle",
but whereas the French original was marked by cool restraint, Lyne's direction
is typically overheated.
Chabrol never showed
us his adulterers together; Lyne pulls out all the stops to display his lovers'
erotic trysts.
More worryingly,
he misjudges the mood of several key scenes, giving rise to some unintentional
comedy. Gere too, though good, doesn't quite carry off all his character's changes
of mood.
Lane, however,
is tremendous. Whether portraying hesitancy, fear, trembling desire or passionate
surrender, she is always honest, truthful, and utterly convincing.
"Unfaithful"
opens in UK cinemas on Friday 7th June 2002.
Reviewed by , 91Èȱ¬ Films
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