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More on Lyne, "Unfaithful," and "Lolita"
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From: Sandy P. Klein <spklein52@hotmail.com>
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/printedition/calendar/la-000033939may14.st
ry
THE BIG PICTURE
STEAM CLEANING
By Patrick Goldstein Hearing Adrian Lyne talk about Diane Lane, the
co-star of "Unfaithful," his new film about a happily married woman's
affair with a younger man, you begin to understand why almost any actress
in America would happily do anything--including strip naked--to be in one
of this director's movies.
"Diane breathes a kind of eroticism you just don't see very often in
Hollywood," Lyne explained over lunch at his Benedict Canyon home, his
voice husky and low, as if he were in the confessional. "Sexy women in
Hollywood tend to be tough or hard. But Diane is vulnerable and totally
natural. I was desperate to take all her makeup off because she looked so
naturally beautiful--she just has this wonderful smeared, ragged kind of
radiance."
When Lyne was filming the scene in which Lane first meets her lover,
played by Olivier Martinez, he'd whisper in her ear before each take,
"Vulnerable. You're vulnerable," he says. "When you're making a movie,
you get this astonishing intimacy with actors--it's a lot like having an
affair." When it comes to sex, Lyne is the expert. For the past two
decades, the 61-year-old British-born director has made a series of
titillating morality tales that often ended up being debated on the op-ed
pages--the New York Times' Maureen Dowd weighed in Sunday with her take
on the movie's portrayal of scorned men and straying wives. His films
have provoked critical derision and sent feminists into high dudgeon.
Lyne's movies have a common theme; they chronicle people whose lust sends
their lives careening out of control. He is Hollywood's poet laureate of
headlong erotic abandon. What makes Lyne so unusual is that he has
continued to probe these affairs of the heart in an era when sex has
virtually disappeared from Hollywood movies.
His first big hit, "Flashdance," was a female-empowerment fantasy,
starring Jennifer Beals as a welder by day, bar dancer by night. The
movie got awful reviews, but its sleek visuals inspired hundreds of
copycat MTV videos. Ne! xt came "91/2 Weeks," the saga of a sexually
obsessive relationship between Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. That was
followed by "Fatal Attraction," which starred Michael Douglas as a
happily married man who has a fling with a sexpot who turns out to be a
psycho.
Not long afterward came "Indecent Proposal," with Robert Redford as a
high-roller who offers a young married couple a million bucks if he can
sleep with the wife (Demi Moore) for one night. Most recently, Lyne
directed a remake of "Lolita," the Vladimir Nabokov novel about a
middle-aged man's self-immolating obsession with a 12-year-old nymphet.
Typically for a Lyne film, "Unfaithful" has inspired mixed reactions.
While critics have raved about Lane's performance, opinion has been split
about the movie itself. The film had a good opening weekend ($14.1
million) but in tracking polls men showed little interest in seeing a
movie in which a beautiful wife cheats on a husband who's a doting
provider.
Lyne says that when he showed the film to test audiences, some men were
so enraged by Lane's betrayal of her husband, played by Richard Gere,
that he stopped reading their reaction cards. Focus groups would erupt in
heated arguments. "One of the men would say, 'I can't understand how this
woman could have an affair when her marriage was so good. It's such a
slutty thing to do.' And women would go crazy. They'd literally pounce on
the guy, saying, 'That's the point, you idiot! You do irrational things
when sex is involved.'"
Films from around the globe still deal frankly with carnal relations,
whether it's Alfonso Cuaron's current "Y Tu Mama Tambien" or recent
French films like "Romance" and "Baise-Moi." But in America, where "Sex
and the City" is a huge cable-TV hit, R. Kelly concerts have more raunchy
crotch-grabbing than any strip-club show, and Internet pornography is
almost as big a business as the defense industry, mainstream movies have
been curiously chaste. As critic Michael Atkinson puts it, in today! 's
Hollywood "the sex scene is cinema non grata."
In the early 1970s, sex was a hot dramatic topic in such movies as
"Shampoo," "Carnal Knowledge," "Don't Look Now" and "Last Tango in
Paris." Today sex is on the backburner, relegated to a subject for teen
snickering or to indie films like "Mulholland Drive" and "Monster's
Ball."
What's changed? Just about everything. Movies in the 1970s were still an
adult medium, in which filmmakers grappled with serious dramatic issues
like the sexual revolution that were part of the cultural zeitgeist.
Today's movies are allergic to reality: They're mostly superhero
fantasies, like "The Scorpion King" and "Spider-Man," or gimmicky
romantic comedies, like "Kate and Leopold" or "40 Days and 40 Nights."
Rob Cohen, director of last year's hit "The Fast and the Furious," says a
movie like 1987's "The Witches of Eastwick" could never be made today.
"You'd never get three major movie actresses willing to squirm around in
bed with the Devil, even if it was Jack Nicholson," he says. "You have a
whole new generation of movie stars who are very prudish today."
Lyne's "Lolita" was turned down by every studio in town before eventually
airing on Showtime. "I can't imagine that we would've had trouble
releasing it in the 1970s or 1980s," he says. "But after the JonBenet
[Ramsey] case, there was this international obsession with pedophilia.
Wherever I took the film, the corporate executives were petrified of
being involved with condoning pedophilia."
Lyne says he spent six weeks in an editing room on "Lolita" with an
attorney at his side, telling him what to keep in and what to take out.
"There was an atmosphere of real paranoia. At one point we were
frightened to send the film across interstate lines to New York."
When Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft has two statues of partially nude figures
at Justice Department headquarters covered with blue drapes for his TV
appearances, it would not be a stretch to say that we're in a period of!
profound sexual repression.
________________________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/printedition/calendar/la-000033939may14.st
ry
THE BIG PICTURE
STEAM CLEANING
By Patrick Goldstein Hearing Adrian Lyne talk about Diane Lane, the
co-star of "Unfaithful," his new film about a happily married woman's
affair with a younger man, you begin to understand why almost any actress
in America would happily do anything--including strip naked--to be in one
of this director's movies.
"Diane breathes a kind of eroticism you just don't see very often in
Hollywood," Lyne explained over lunch at his Benedict Canyon home, his
voice husky and low, as if he were in the confessional. "Sexy women in
Hollywood tend to be tough or hard. But Diane is vulnerable and totally
natural. I was desperate to take all her makeup off because she looked so
naturally beautiful--she just has this wonderful smeared, ragged kind of
radiance."
When Lyne was filming the scene in which Lane first meets her lover,
played by Olivier Martinez, he'd whisper in her ear before each take,
"Vulnerable. You're vulnerable," he says. "When you're making a movie,
you get this astonishing intimacy with actors--it's a lot like having an
affair." When it comes to sex, Lyne is the expert. For the past two
decades, the 61-year-old British-born director has made a series of
titillating morality tales that often ended up being debated on the op-ed
pages--the New York Times' Maureen Dowd weighed in Sunday with her take
on the movie's portrayal of scorned men and straying wives. His films
have provoked critical derision and sent feminists into high dudgeon.
Lyne's movies have a common theme; they chronicle people whose lust sends
their lives careening out of control. He is Hollywood's poet laureate of
headlong erotic abandon. What makes Lyne so unusual is that he has
continued to probe these affairs of the heart in an era when sex has
virtually disappeared from Hollywood movies.
His first big hit, "Flashdance," was a female-empowerment fantasy,
starring Jennifer Beals as a welder by day, bar dancer by night. The
movie got awful reviews, but its sleek visuals inspired hundreds of
copycat MTV videos. Ne! xt came "91/2 Weeks," the saga of a sexually
obsessive relationship between Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. That was
followed by "Fatal Attraction," which starred Michael Douglas as a
happily married man who has a fling with a sexpot who turns out to be a
psycho.
Not long afterward came "Indecent Proposal," with Robert Redford as a
high-roller who offers a young married couple a million bucks if he can
sleep with the wife (Demi Moore) for one night. Most recently, Lyne
directed a remake of "Lolita," the Vladimir Nabokov novel about a
middle-aged man's self-immolating obsession with a 12-year-old nymphet.
Typically for a Lyne film, "Unfaithful" has inspired mixed reactions.
While critics have raved about Lane's performance, opinion has been split
about the movie itself. The film had a good opening weekend ($14.1
million) but in tracking polls men showed little interest in seeing a
movie in which a beautiful wife cheats on a husband who's a doting
provider.
Lyne says that when he showed the film to test audiences, some men were
so enraged by Lane's betrayal of her husband, played by Richard Gere,
that he stopped reading their reaction cards. Focus groups would erupt in
heated arguments. "One of the men would say, 'I can't understand how this
woman could have an affair when her marriage was so good. It's such a
slutty thing to do.' And women would go crazy. They'd literally pounce on
the guy, saying, 'That's the point, you idiot! You do irrational things
when sex is involved.'"
Films from around the globe still deal frankly with carnal relations,
whether it's Alfonso Cuaron's current "Y Tu Mama Tambien" or recent
French films like "Romance" and "Baise-Moi." But in America, where "Sex
and the City" is a huge cable-TV hit, R. Kelly concerts have more raunchy
crotch-grabbing than any strip-club show, and Internet pornography is
almost as big a business as the defense industry, mainstream movies have
been curiously chaste. As critic Michael Atkinson puts it, in today! 's
Hollywood "the sex scene is cinema non grata."
In the early 1970s, sex was a hot dramatic topic in such movies as
"Shampoo," "Carnal Knowledge," "Don't Look Now" and "Last Tango in
Paris." Today sex is on the backburner, relegated to a subject for teen
snickering or to indie films like "Mulholland Drive" and "Monster's
Ball."
What's changed? Just about everything. Movies in the 1970s were still an
adult medium, in which filmmakers grappled with serious dramatic issues
like the sexual revolution that were part of the cultural zeitgeist.
Today's movies are allergic to reality: They're mostly superhero
fantasies, like "The Scorpion King" and "Spider-Man," or gimmicky
romantic comedies, like "Kate and Leopold" or "40 Days and 40 Nights."
Rob Cohen, director of last year's hit "The Fast and the Furious," says a
movie like 1987's "The Witches of Eastwick" could never be made today.
"You'd never get three major movie actresses willing to squirm around in
bed with the Devil, even if it was Jack Nicholson," he says. "You have a
whole new generation of movie stars who are very prudish today."
Lyne's "Lolita" was turned down by every studio in town before eventually
airing on Showtime. "I can't imagine that we would've had trouble
releasing it in the 1970s or 1980s," he says. "But after the JonBenet
[Ramsey] case, there was this international obsession with pedophilia.
Wherever I took the film, the corporate executives were petrified of
being involved with condoning pedophilia."
Lyne says he spent six weeks in an editing room on "Lolita" with an
attorney at his side, telling him what to keep in and what to take out.
"There was an atmosphere of real paranoia. At one point we were
frightened to send the film across interstate lines to New York."
When Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft has two statues of partially nude figures
at Justice Department headquarters covered with blue drapes for his TV
appearances, it would not be a stretch to say that we're in a period of!
profound sexual repression.
________________________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com.