Themes: Infidelity, Dangerous Attraction, Crimes of Passion
Main Cast: Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Olivier Martinez, Erik Per Sullivan, Zeljko Ivanek
Release Year: 2002
Country: US
Run Time: 124 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Diane Lane is a wayward wife and Richard Gere is her suspicious husband in Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful. Connie (Lane) leaves her suburban home on an errand, venturing into Manhattan during a wicked windstorm. On a trash-strewn Soho street, she literally runs into Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez), a handsome young Frenchman carrying a huge stack of books. Connie has a bad scrape on her knee, and is unable to get a cab, so Paul invites her up to his apartment. Paul is quietly flirtatious as he gives Connie some ice and a bandage for her knee. Connie phones home and explains to her son, Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan), that she's running late. Before she leaves, Paul gives her a book of Persian poetry, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. She mentions the encounter in passing to Edward (Gere), her husband, but it's clear that she's obsessing about Paul, and soon she's back in the city, with a pretext for calling him up. Soon, they are lovers, and they grow bolder and bolder in their passion. Edward begins to suspect, and eventually gets a private investigator (Dominic Chianese of The Sopranos) to follow Connie. His worst fears confirmed, Edward decides to confront Paul, a decision that will come to haunt him. While the screenplay for Unfaithful is credited to Alvin Sargent (Ordinary People) and William Broyles Jr. (Cast Away), the inspiration for Lyne's film came from Claude Chabrol's acclaimed 1969 film La Femme Infidele. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
Review
A well-appointed movie about a woman punished for sexual desire? Then it must be Adrian Lyne's latest opus about the perils of pleasure. Rather than a man-eating careerist or a money-strapped wife-turned-single night prostitute, Unfaithful's degraded female is a pampered housewife with too much time on her hands and not nearly enough to occupy her minuscule mind. Adopting a determinedly serious tone meant to mitigate such preposterous plot conceits as the fateful windstorm and the undesirability of Richard Gere, Lyne lingers over the "erotic" encounters between Diane Lane and très français lover Olivier Martinez with his usual affinity for classy soft core, pausing long enough to allow the supporting characters to deliver clumsy lines clarifying the allegedly deep morality play at hand. Lane and Martinez do their best to flesh out their repellent non-characters, and Gere effectively channels most of his smolder into finely contained rage and pain, but the lead trio is finally done in by William Broyles and Alvin Sargent's hopelessly mediocre script as well as Lyne's ham-fisted imagery. Though men might enjoy the spectacle of the American Gigolo reduced to cuckold, Unfaithful is hardly the alternative summer movie for intelligent adults that Lyne and his cohorts wish. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
John Kasarda - Art Director, Kerry Barden - Casting, Billy Hopkins - Casting, Suzanne Smith - Casting, Mark Bennett - Casting, Ellen Mirojnick - Costume Designer, Vebe Borge - First Assistant Director, Adrian Lyne - Director, Anne V. Coates - Editor, Lawrence Steven Meyers - Executive Producer, Arnon Milchan - Executive Producer, Pierre-Richard Muller - Executive Producer, Jan A.P. Kaczmarek - Composer (Music Score), Brian Morris - Production Designer, Peter Biziou - Cinematographer, Arnold Kopelson - Producer, Adrian Lyne - Producer, Anne Kopelson - Producer, G. Mac Brown - Producer, Susan Bode-Tyson - Set Designer, Tod A. Maitland - Sound/Sound Designer, Alan Rankin - Sound/Sound Designer, Alvin Sargent - Screenwriter, William Broyles - Screenwriter, Richard Rutkowski - Additional Cinematography, Wylie Stateman - Supervising Sound Editor, Michael Dennison - Costumes Supervisor
