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Adrian Lyne’s new movie, Unfaithful, is based on a French classic - but with a very modern twist. And, says Eleanor Singer, it shows us a whole new side of Richard Gere.
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It was the role in which Richard Gere was being asked to be… well, to be anything but Richard Gere. “One day,” recalls Adrian Lyne, director of Unfaithful, “he went home to his wife wearing the wardrobe he wears in the film. His wife looked at him, gave him a big hug and said, ‘You’re just an ordinary guy in this one!’”
Unfaithful is inspired by Claude Chabrol’s 1968 classic La femme infidèle, about a man who slowly begins to suspect that his wife is having an affair. The suspicion turns into an obsession as the cuckolded husband trails his wife’s lover and finally discovers the obsessive within himself. Lyne calls it “one of my favourite films” and describes it as “a kind of Hitchcockian piece wherein a husband gradually becomes aware that his wife is having an affair”. Hence the title of the film - of both films.
In Chabrol’s original movie, the role taken by Gere in this one is played by Michel Bouquet, an actor who made a career out of being the essence of ordinariness (he recently re-emerged in the arthouse hit Toto-le-héros). The film was given added spice by the fact that the adulterous wife was played by Stéphane Audran, Chabrol’s wife. They were divorced not long afterwards.
Lyne had been toying with the idea of remaking or adapting the Chabrol movie for a couple of decades. Seeing Gere in Robert Altman’s Dr T and the Women gave the project a decisive nudge on the way towards getting made, however.
“It seemed that he’d reached a kind of plateau,” notes Lyne of the actor’s role in that film. “He had a kind of serenity and niceness that I hadn’t seen before. I thought it was interesting how he was used in that. And, if you look at him in this one, I think you’ll be surprised.”
In ‘this one’, Gere plays Edward Sumner, a man who has everything: home, wife, a child, career, money. He may be middle-aged, but he still looks pretty damn good. He lives in the kind of house that non-Americans - and probably a lot of Americans - have come to accept as the epitome of affluence (Unfaithful was shot on location in the upscale New York State community of White Plains). And then it all goes wrong.
Of course, his character should have seen the signs, says Gere, pointing out, however, that the signs so often make sense only after the event. “I’ve always been interested that we’re all unknowable to each other,” says the actor, who was immediately drawn to the “very textured, very intimate” screenplay by Alvin Sargent (who won an Oscar for working in similar territory with Ordinary People in 1981) and William Broyles, Jr (whose most recent credits are Cast Away and Planet of the Apes).
“What flaw is it in us that can be touched so quickly into obsession or even violence?” wonders the actor. “In this case, we’re dealing with a normal, recognisable American family who have somehow stopped growing. They’ve settled into something that is very nice, and it works for them; but it’s not taking them anyplace forward. It’s not bringing more love; it’s not bringing more intimacy; it’s not bringing more truth. So, in their separate ways, these people are discovering some kind of black-hole areas inside themselves.
“There are levels of intimacy that just aren’t being dealt with between these people. We’re closed up on many levels. We have layers of armour around us, and I think that’s what we all liked about this story: If we look in the mirror of the movie, we can see ourselves.”
The other half of ‘these people’ is Edward’s wife, Connie, played by Diane Lane. Comfortable, perhaps over-protected, in her little White Plains palace, she has her complacency shattered by a chance encounter on a Soho street with a good-looking, mysterious Frenchman called Paul (Olivier Martinez). Paul is everything that Edward isn’t, and the encounter leads to a passionate affair which in turns leads to the film’s climactic act of passion.
“At the beginning of the story,” says Lane, “Connie is unquestioning of her marriage. She loves her husband and child, and she’s happy in her life. Her whole world is defined by who she is in her marriage. In a certain way, her relationship with Edward is taken for granted.
“But I think that what often happens with relationships in the long term is that you stay within the frame of the person that you knew, that you met. And suddenly you may feel that you’re not only that person all the time. We go through changes, and you don’t always realise until something sparks you to see yourself in a different light. That’s what makes Connie vulnerable.”
