When your partner is cheating you know it, and feel it immediately. Now, whether or not you choose to listen to your gut is another story. But what if a marriage seems happy enough, but one just stumbles into an affair? I am no shrink, but as Olivier Martinez (in the character of Paul Martel) tells Connie Sumner (Diane Lane of The Glass House) there is no such thing as accidents, only what you do and what you don’t do. The movie Unfaithful explores the topic of a cheating spouse and how these situations can only end disastrously because someone will get hurt.

Unfaithful begins with the home life of Connie and her family we where see she is a loving mother to the nine year old Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan of Joe Dirt). She has a caring and attentive husband Edward (Richard Gere of The Mothman Prophecies) who is very successful. They have a large New York home in the suburbs and a house cleaner, Gloria (Myra Lucretia Taylor of Changing Lanes). Connie goes into the city on a particular windy day and is literally blown over on top of Martel, whom the romantic hottie that he is, chases her belongings down in the street. Connie has bloody knees from her fall, so she accepts his offer to go up to his apartment to clean up. This choice leads her to many other choices of lies and deceptions as she begins a tawdry affair with the considerably younger Martel.

The sex scenes border along the lines of 9 ½ Weeks and Body of Evidence. The fact that Martel is very sexy and speaks with an accent is all the more convincing of Connie’s choice to throw away her marriage of 11 years and hurt her child as well as her husband. As I said before, you always know when the affairs begin, but when you choose to listen to yourself depends. For Edward, he didn’t seek confirmation of his wife’s lies until a man he just fired Bill Stone (Chad Lowe) told him to examine his own family life. Stone witnessed Connie making out in a restaurant in Soho earlier, but never told Edward until he was fired for not being loyal, gotta love the irony.

The sex scenes keep you interested, and Martinez has you mesmerized with his animal sexual drive and lust for Connie. Gere on the other hand doesn’t seem to have any acting ability. He delivers his lines with the same tone and appeal that he gives to every character I have ever seen him play. They all seem to meld together as the same person. This is disappointing because he has always been a large box office draw. Others in Unfaithful were Joseph Badalucco Jr. (The Siege), Murielle Arden (Someone Like You), Erich Anderson, Michelle Monagahan and Zeljko Ivanek (Black Hawk Down). Adrain Lyne directed Unfaithful and Alvin Sargent wrote the screen play. The film runs a little long but all in all it is a decent film. On the About-Movies scale I give Unfaithful an eight.

Last updated: Thursday, March 20, 2008 02:48:42 AM

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