Friday, May 10, 2002 | 8:37 a.m.
Unfaithful
I've never liked Richard Gere much. He emotes by squinting, even when he's supposed to be happy. While I concede that he gets the point across most of the time -- it's a nuanced squint -- I don't think that's any way to make money. Someday his face is going to freeze like that.
While we're on the subject, I can't stand director Adrian Lyne. His "Lolita" was an abomination. "Fatal Attraction" was a cheesy monster movie with Glenn Close in place of Frankenstein. "9 1/2 Weeks," "Indecent Proposal," "Flashdance" -- all stinkers. The only thing keeping him from making softcore pornography for Showtime is the fact that he fancies himself an artist, which means lots of close-ups of navels. "Unfaithful," his remake of Claude Chabrol's "La Femme Infidele," is just another everlasting navel gaze.
It's funny that one should bring out the best in the other, but Gere's performance in "Unfaithful" -- playing cuckolded husband Edward Sumner -- is the best I've seen out of him. He puts on uneasy smiles, dizzy rage and false calm as easily as Lyne can exploit them. Anyone who's ever been cheated on knows what Gere's character is feeling, and can read the traffic of emotions on his face. He's almost too good, at that -- and he makes the rest of the movie look like the cheap potboiler that it is.
Gere's wife, Connie (played by Diane Lane), trips one day in SoHo, and is helped by a young French book dealer named Paul (Olivier Martinez). He invites her up to his apartment to clean up her scraped knee and to get a cup of tea; before she leaves he gives her a book of Omar Khayyam verse and a smoldering, "I'm your chew toy" look. If you've seen any Pepe LePew cartoons you recognize immediately what Paul is up to, but Connie falls for it anyway, and before long a full-blown affair is under way.
Edward suspects from the beginning, but Gere keeps him human: Even as he hires a private investigator to trail his wife, Edward remains a good man in a bad season. His steadfastness and restraint actually help Connie along; he keeps the family running while she falls to pieces. Even if he blurts out such questions as "Do you love me, Con?" at awkward moments, he's unquestionably the one with the level head -- which makes Lyne's one big surprise all the more affecting.
Much will be made of the sex scenes in "Unfaithful," but only by those viewers whose notion of sex was formed during the Reagan era. As I said before, Lyne's work is this close to "Red Shoe Diaries" and the like; his idea of a sex scene is a bunch of quick vignettes broken up by close-ups of Connie weeping on the train ride home. It's Hollywood's fatal flaw: The big studios are continually fighting the MPAA on issues of violence and language in films, while sex is treated as a lost cause.
And ours is pretty much the only major filmmaking country in the world that feels that way. One only need watch the terrific Mexican film "Y Tu Mama Tambien" to know what "Unfaithful" is missing -- namely, desire iteslf. "Unfaithful" needs to induce that pit-of-the-stomach feeling that overrules logic and makes everything that comes afterward -- the sex, the tears, the violence -- make sense. We need to feel desire to be where Edward, Connie and Paul are.
But we don't get it. We never understand what's driving Connie to Paul, and that's purely Lyne's fault. He forgets to seduce the group that paid for the feeling.
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