Adrian Lyne, agent provocateur of Lolita, Indecent Proposal, Fatal Attraction, et al., gets out the blackened oven mitts for his réchauffé of Claude Chabrol's adultery-and-murder dish, La Femme Infidèle. The suburban housewife, Constance (get the irony?), contentedly married for eleven years to the head of a New York security firm (more irony), literally bumps into a French antiquarian book dealer (a nod to the nationality of the source material as well as a nod to "motivation," insofar as a French accent will automatically produce a weakness in the American woman's knees) on a shopping trip to Manhattan in the midst of a portentous windstorm. The dealer fumbles his navel-to-chin stack of books; the shopper skins her knee (symbolizing her weak point). She really ought to tend to it tout de suite. And the dealer lives just above -- see the plant on the balcony? Would she like to come up? Would she like a cup of coffee? (Would she like to be in a TV spot for General Foods' French Vanilla Cafe?) Though she was not looking for an adventure, opportunity has come knocking. Diane Lane, never better, nor better-looking, is eloquently expressive on the frissons of flirting, taking risks, misbehaving, and days later (during the post-coital train ride home) on the mercurial clash of guilt and delight. D.W. Griffith, to overcome the handicap of silence and title-cards, could not have asked more from an actress. (In one area at least, he would not have asked as much: letting her keep her clothes on and her co-star's paws off her breasts.) Lyne, not so coolly and critically detached as Chabrol from his characters, doesn't make things easy on them, or on the spoon-fed mass audience. Madame Bovary was not married to Richard Gere, after all. Nor was her head turned by the Geronimo-haired, Miami Vice-bearded Olivier Martinez ("Your eyes are amazing, you know zat? You should never shut zem"). Then again, Lyne doesn't make things easy on critics, either, balancing one stellar performance and a solid game plan against a landslide of his usual slush: the purple passages (an acrobatic coupling in the men's room while two gal-pals await the heroine at a café table out front, or the more comfortable coupling in the seats at a revival-house showing of M. Hulot's Holiday), the dusty, speckly, almost pointillistic color, the perfume-ad "glamour," the gorging on the Good Life. The would-be moralist is overwhelmed again by the exhibitionist. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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