Why can't Hollywood make sexually mature movies?

Movies and, especially, contemporary fiction have made a near fetish of the woman who has subsumed her identity in the role of wife and mother. When you watch the way Connie goes about getting breakfast or cleaning the dishes or fussing over her young son Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan), you feel as if she's afraid to waste a second. And yet Lane knows that those are easy explanations for Connie's affair, clichéd ones. She takes the role out of the realm of feminist case study. With no fuss, no big scenes or speeches, nothing more than the clouds that pass over her face when she's by herself, Lane suggests that Connie is acting out of an elemental human need.

Lane acts with an astonishing physicality. I don't think I've ever seen anything like Lane's first sex scene with Martinez. She's both turned on and terrified, trembling so that, when he touches her, you actually see her flesh vibrate. And Lane is utterly amazing when, after this first assignation, Connie rides home on the commuter train, disheveled and luxuriating in her memory of the afternoon, veering between smiling with pleasure at her own daring, and then suddenly drawing her body protectively inward in a way that lets you know she's thinking, "What have I done?" It's one of the fullest portrayals of sexual desire and pleasure and fear I've ever seen in a movie. Lane doesn't do anything you'd expect. Connie feels guilt and shame but Lane doesn't allow those emotions to dominate. And she doesn't pass judgment on Connie by making the affair a compulsion, and thus an aberration.

Infidelity is as touchy a subject in the movies as in real life. It's almost impossible to discuss rationally. When a marriage is undergoing a rocky phase (whether caused by infidelity or by something else) a couple can, in the midst of their own differences, unexpectedly find themselves bound together by the fear their troubles elicit in their other married friends. Couples often draw away from friends who are having marital troubles lest their own unions become contaminated. And it's that fear, I think, that causes people to be so automatically judgmental about fictional treatments of infidelity. (It's part of the reason that male philanderers are almost always presented as monsters, yet women who cheat are shown to be acting out of need.)

What Lane does in "Unfaithful" isn't going to be balm for anyone's comfort zone. She doesn't play Connie's affair as a rejection of her marriage but as something separate from it. It's not that Lane is using the role to say that an affair is a good thing. But her performance implies the uncomfortable truth that an affair needn't be the end of a marriage, that sexual need can exist outside the bonds of matrimony. She's at her most alluring when she gives a dirty little smile of surprise as Martinez slides his hand down the back of her jeans while they linger over lunch in a SoHo cafe or, at his place, when she slides her own hand down the front to masturbate in front of him.

In one scene, Martinez ventures into a restaurant where Lane is having coffee with some girlfriends and the two of them have a quickie in the bathroom. A few minutes later, in his apartment, she asks: "Did you really just fuck me back there?" She's so alive with sensual pride in her own adventurousness that only a prude would attempt to deny her pleasure.

Yet Lane plays her scenes opposite Gere with only a slight distance between them, no revulsion and (with the exception of one scene where she leaves him in the bath after he's slid in with her), no pulling away. And when she begins to pull away from Martinez, she doesn't play it as if Connie had learned her lesson but as if she has moved on, as if she has found the affair wanting in something she has in her marriage. In some basic way, Lane's performance honors the one irreducible truth about marriage -- that no one outside a union can possibly know, or judge, what goes on inside it.

Next Page: In Lyne's world, illicit sex has to look physically uncomfortable as well

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