Why can't Hollywood make sexually mature movies?

If Lyne and his screenwriters Alvin Sargent and William Broyles Jr. had been as brave as their actress, the movie might be remarkable. But this is, after all, a Lyne movie. You know what's coming when the talk among Connie and her friends turns to affairs and one of them (Kate Burton) says something like, "It always winds up causing trouble." We know that Lyne is putting as much distance between himself and the truths of Lane's performance as he can and making a beeline back to the reassuring ground on which adultery can be judged rather than understood. While Connie isn't the raging psycho Glenn Close was in Lyne's "Fatal Attraction" (a movie that's practically a brief for right-wing notions of sexuality and family values), she is still a woman engaged in an adulterous affair and thus, for Lyne, a catalyst for disaster.

In the second half of "Unfaithful" (which is loosely based on Claude Chabrol's 1969 "La Femme Infidèle"), the point of view shifts to Gere's Edward as he finds out about the affair. He's the good man driven to extremes, and we're meant to understand that it's Connie who's placed him in that position. As the movie shifts into its thriller mode, replete with a pair of dogged, menacing cops (played by Zeljko Ivanek and Gary Basaraba), Connie becomes the movie's Pandora, and Lane works hard to maintain the ground she's gained in the first half. It's about as thankless a position as a Planned Parenthood official appearing on Fox News.

From the start, Lyne is up to his old tricks. The movie opens with tinkly piano music over a montage of a child's bike, a decorative wind chime springing into life, autumn leaves blowing around a yard. It's a fetishization of suburban affluence in the "Ordinary People" mode (co-writer Sargent scripted that film). When Gere describes the advantages of the suburbs that caused him and Connie to leave New York, you wonder what he's talking about. The whole damn movie, shot by Peter Biziou and designed by Brian Morris, is in dour earth tones. It looks as if Restoration Hardware had turned its collection over to a depressive. The real difference between Lane and Gere's comfy showplace and Martinez's SoHo walk-up is that they've got a cleaning woman. The shabbiness of the apartment, defined by the unmade postcoital bed, is meant to stand for the squalidness of the affair.

As a filmmaker, Lyne is a whore posing as a moralist. He uses his hot topics to lure audiences in and then casts stones. "Unfaithful" picks up on a trick he used in "Fatal Attraction": When he wants to convey a disapproval of sex, he stages it to look physically uncomfortable. He has no feel for sensuality, which is a good thing for him since he's a sexual reactionary. We're conscious of the tease of the sex scenes, the way they're cut off by Anne V. Coates' jagged editing, the coy almost-nudity. Instead of just letting the encounters play out (the way Catherine Breillat did in "Romance" and "Fat Girl"), Lyne chops them up. You half expect to pick up the soundtrack and find a track listed as "Adultery Montage."

Lyne even screws up what should be the most daring scenes, like the one where Lane bends over and dares Martinez to fuck her on the landing outside his apartment. A disapproving air hovers over the glimpses of their encounters, like the shot of them fooling around in a theater during a Jacques Tati festival. (What else can you do at a Tati movie? Watch it?) Instead of dovetailing Martinez's espresso-bar Lothario ("Zere are no meestake. Zere ees only what yew do and what yew do not do!") with the hard realities of Lane's performance -- in other words, making it clear that this relationship is about sex -- Lyne has made him the Euro-sleaze who's a must to avoid. (I found it more alarming that when we first see him, he's carrying a Herman Wouk novel.)

I wish Lane's performance could have subverted the entire movie. But she's working against the preconceptions about a woman who cheats, and Lyne, in both his point of view and visual presentation, is working to reinforce them. It's a remarkably grown-up performance in a movie that can stand for the infantile way Hollywood talks down to moviegoers about sex. Gere, who has settled into middle age very comfortably and has recently shown an appealing relaxation in comedy, reverts to the forced, phony acting he did in his years as a young hot shot. With all his anguished thrashing about, he becomes the moral standard-bearer for the boys behind the camera. You want to tell them to watch the hard-won truths of Lane's performance and grow up.

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