Unfaithful (2002)

Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful arrives from 2002, a moment when a studio could still release an erotic thriller about a bored Westchester wife and let the audience sit with the discomfort. Diane Lane plays Connie Sumner, who collides with a Frenchman in SoHo and, across three visits to his loft, quietly dismantles a good marriage. The picture is a remake of Claude Chabrol's La Femme infidele and it keeps the older film's refusal to explain itself. Lyne has said he wanted two people who were perfectly happy, with the infidelity arriving arbitrarily. That choice denies us a villain. It also denies us a lesson. The studio reportedly pushed for a gray marriage and unsatisfying sex, the better to make the wife sympathetic. Lyne fought it, and the result is a film that declines to instruct anybody about anything.

What the film does contain: an affluent suburban household, a snow globe, a body in a landfill, a child nearly forgotten at his school gate. What it does not contain is any argument about the society that produced these people. The Sumners have money and a handsome house. The film regards all of it as scenery. Nobody proposes a wealth tax. Race never enters the frame, and neither does any other category of identity. The cast is white, the concerns are marital, the moral questions are entirely private. There is no sermon and no third-act speech about how we ought to live. Gere's Edward delivers a bitter monologue near the end, but it is a confession of rage, not a thesis.

Decades of cultural criticism have trained us to hunt for the message in the frame. Unfaithful offers none. It is a chamber piece about guilt and jealousy and the arbitrary nature of desire, and it treats its audience as adults capable of holding an unresolvable ending without a handout. The final traffic light, the police station just visible, the fantasy of escape: these are the instruments of ambiguity, not instruction. Lane's performance carries the whole enterprise, her face registering lust and regret in the same breath. By the standards of its own era and of ours, the film is almost aggressively free of social commentary. That is either its limitation or its integrity. The classification holds either way.