UNFAITHFUL
A perfect Westchester County wife has a perfectly torrid affair with
an oversexed Eurotrash book dealer down in SoHo, and her husband feels
perfectly wretched--and vengeful--when he finds out.
(Now in stores)
CAST: Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Olivier Martinez, Chad Lowe, Kate
Burton, Margaret Colin, Erik Per Sullivan
DIRECTOR: Adrian Lyne
"As Connie Sumner, the wife and mother who shatters her seemingly
idyllic life with husband Edward (Richard Gere) in the swank burbs
of New York's Westchester County by fucking her brains out with Paul
(Olivier Martinez), a hunky SoHo bookseller, Lane is a force of nature.
Her slow-burning, fiercely erotic performance charges the movie, which
is a sordid, silky wallow in guilty sex--and I mean that as a compliment...Lane
and Martinez turn on enough carnality to singe the screen. And Gere,
though still more stud than shlub, locates the emotional reserves
in Edward that might chill a marriage. When Edward finally unleashes
his pent-up rage, Gere is shockingly good." --Peter Travers, Rolling
Stone
"You don't believe Diane Lane, who is beautiful but as inert as depleted
uranium, playing a nominally happy, prosperous housewife...You don't
believe Richard Gere as her hubby, a powerful armored car executive...And
least of all do you believe that Connie [Lane] could fall for the
sleazy brie-sucking lounge lizard named Paul Martel, played at warp-creep
drive by a Frenchy face-man named Olivier Martinez, with that oh-so-Eurotrashy
scruff of beard and that tumbling froth of mane. He's like a junior
G-man Fabio wannabe...In the end, 'Unfaithful' leaves you dispirited
and grumpy: All that money spent, all that talent wasted, all that
time gone forever, and for what?" --Stephen Hunter, The Washington
Post
"Ms. Lane has the role of her career in Connie, and her indelible
(and ultimately sympathetic) performance is both archetypal and minutely
detailed...the lovers are so besotted that when the urge overtakes
them, they have sex standing up, and their frantic rutting, instead
of satiety, leaves them raw and aching for more...In portraying Edward,
Mr. Gere, who is now 52, has shucked off the preening narcissism of
his younger days to give a performance that is remarkably devoid of
vanity." --Stephen Holden, The New York Times
"Diane Lane gives her most completely realized performance as the
suburban goddess who betrays husband Richard Gere with paramour Olivier
Martinez. Lane's finely emotional presentation is the film's convincer,
one of the few things about it that feel recognizably real....Lyne,
the veteran of 'Fatal Attraction,' '91/2 Weeks,' 'Indecent Proposal'
and 'Lolita,' is one of the movies' last moralists, an expert at using
taste and decorum to elevate soap opera material. His is the world
of amour fou, mad love, where people are so rip-their-clothes-off
crazy for each other we never have to expend the effort to wonder
exactly what the attraction is." --Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles
Times
"Instead of pumping up the plot with recycled manufactured thrills,
it's content to contemplate two reasonably sane adults who get themselves
into an almost insoluble dilemma...Richard Gere and Diane Lane are
well-suited to the roles, exuding a kind of serene materialism that
seems happily settled in suburbia. It is all the more shocking when
Lane revisits Martel's apartment because there is no suggestion that
she is unhappy with Gere, starved for sex, or especially impulsive.
She goes back up there because--well, because she wants to." --Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
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