peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2022 03 28 Unfaithful

Unfaithful (2002)

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Out of sheer curiosity I dug up Adrian Lyne's previous feature (the last before his retirement). Diane Lane, married to a bland Richard Gere, goes all-in on an unmotivated affair with Olivier Martinez in 2002 in NYC. Once again there's a lot of repetitive repetition. Perhaps the highlight for me was when an ornament (a snow globe) witnesses common knowledge (!) — you can see the two leads falling into an unbounded epistemic abyss of dawning awareness. Otherwise it is far too often so dumb. The ending is amoral, unlike Lyne's earlier Lolita — there's an echo of it in a police siren in the closing scenes — and it is hard to see why things are left to dangle. That suburban living will get you every time.

Roger Ebert: three stars too many. Lane and Gere, serenely materialistic, yes. Stephen Holden. That scene where Lyne cuts from affair to train ride had me hoping he'd ride the ambiguity somewhere. Perhaps he, like Michael Mann, has just been remaking the same movie time and again.