I can think of
few English-language films that deal intelligently with the
subject of adultery, fewer still that approach it temperately.
It tends to dominate the dramatic action when addressed directly,
becoming an idea, the idea, rather than an ingredient in the
tapestry of a film’s action. When it is not addressed
directly, it remains, as homosexuality in contemporary American
comedies, forcefully present, perhaps more so for staying
just outside the conversation. A cinema predicated on heterosexual
union -- from the most serious dramas (In the Bedroom)
to the slightest comedies (You’ve Got Mail)
-- is always mindful of threats to that union; adultery is
the most dramatically promising kind of threat.
One
needn’t look far to see the schizophrenia of a culture
that holds to the dream of romantic union even as the reality
of divorce rates press so firmly in the opposite direction.
If self-delusion on cultural-wide scale is a disease, then
to break down a culture’s delusions is to disturb its
sense of self, and if the extremity of its reaction is conducive
to the depth of its deception, then, with respect at least
to how it’s been treated in English-language cinema,
there is surely something left unsaid on the topic of adultery.
Between its capacities to affirm and question people’s
beliefs, to comfort and disturb them, and to reflect their
lives back to them and show them a life they could only vicariously
fantasize about, recent films that place adultery center-stage
converse with another and, in their own schizophrenic relationship
to adultery, help us understand our present confusion.
For
this reason, many of the more interesting films involving
adultery are schizophrenic on the subject, making clear the
repressions and delusions of the hetero-marriage ideal while
slandering those who disturb it, alternately taking the prejudice
apart and ramming it into place. If the latter tends to win
out, this is because these films use adultery as the main
source of tension and dramatic action, and dial its representation
to a lunatic pitch; in this context, critiques of propriety
or repression shrink in the face of the adulterous act, which
is always a more threatening and grotesque unreality than
the self-delusion of bourgeois normalcy.
In
Fatal Attraction, the disruption of a happy marriage
unleashes a psychosexual terror that would have been better
off left in the darkness of imagination, as Glenn Close’s
homicidal obsession rages through the film as pure sexuality
and the same for the sickness led Michael Douglas to cheat
instead of the anarchy it unleashes.
Mike
Nichols’s Closer also pathologizes the adulterous
drive; its four principles are junkies addicted to surfaces
-- dermatologist, obituary writer, stripper, photographer
-- and to getting as close as possible to people without being
close at all. Their rapturous wordplay is a distancing mechanism,
and the fact that they trade partners as freely and energetically
as insults says their behaviour is self-destructive, the impulse
of which leads them to step literally and metaphorically in
front of cars.
Behind
this need to pathologize the adulterous instinct is the desire
to preserve not simply heterosexual union but the monogamous
ideal, the notion that two people ought to stay true to one
another, and that any interference in this state of affairs
is a sign that something is off. Closer wages this
battle in the open, where this theme of arrested development
clashes with the sheer pleasure of watching a giddy whirl
of words and betrayals that, after a short time, are no longer
betrayals, since everyone, audience and characters included,
desire them. By the end, the idea that the characters are
self-destructive shrinks in the majesty of gladiatorial confrontations
that herald the collapse of the film’s tenuous heterosexual
unions and give life to the characters in the first place.
Scene-by-scene, Closer’s narrative jumps from
the beginning to the end of these relationships without wasting
time in-between, interested in stability only as something
to tear apart.
Other
recent films that deal with adultery as a major theme can
hardly contain their excitement at playing with idea of monogamy,
stretching it to see how much it can take. Beyond Glenn Close’s
burlesque and Closer’s partner-swapping is
Eyes Wide Shut’s iniquitous nightscape, a dream
world that repeatedly dangles the impossible promise of extramarital
sex -- most memorably through costumed orgy in a politician’s
mansion. The added layer of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s
real life marriage introduces a monogamous ideal only to disturb
it, suggesting an essentially performative nature at its core.
It is a gesture as deliberate as the slow, repeated piano
note punctuating the soundtrack, a controlled cadence barely
containing the sexual hysteria beneath the film’s immaculate
surface. This motif returns in Unfaithful, with Richard
Gere’s face now the pristine surface of bourgeois propriety,
and Olivia Martinez, all scruffy hair and hard-angled abdominals,
the sharp, unkempt promise of sexual fulfillment, testified
to by Diane Lane’s tortured, coital magnificence.
In
Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, married
man Jesse and single woman Celine spend eighty minutes walking
around Paris, captured by lengthy daylight tracking shots
reminiscent of the night-time shots of Eyes Wide Shut.
But where Kubrick’s night-time streets seem deep and
endless, the streets of Before Sunset are known,
the two characters and the audience conscience of a fast-approaching
endpoint. Jesse and Celine wander between the fixed pole of
monogamy on one hand and adultery on the other. Until its
remarkable closing shot, Before Sunset is a time-fixed
space in which the imagination of transgression can stretch
itself.
An
amped-up version of this effect is found in Sarah Polley’s
Take This Waltz, where married Margo and single artist
neighbour Daniel carry their flirtation into an indoor ride
that whips two-seater pods back and forth as “Video
Killed the Radio Star” blasts on loudspeakers. Speed
and sound overwhelm the senses as the pair whirls through
darkness and bounce off one another, untouchable by conscience
or the possibility of carrying their flirtation further. Then
suddenly lights cut on, cab slows, and reality, in the form
of an overweight employee, brings them back down to earth.
Like
all the films I’ve mentioned that deal with adultery
and, by extension, monogamy, Take This Waltz is a
perpetual motion machine. And, as with the elements of those
films associated with motion -- the tracking shots of Before
Sunset and Eyes Wide Shut, the dialogue and
partner-swapping of Closer -- the ride is a particularly
exaggerated expression. It’s also an overplayed metaphor,
as Margo rides it alone in the closing shots of the film,
all the magic gone. By then, the film has joined her symbolically
to her alcoholic sister-in-law, with the latter’s jarringly
unreal declamation – “We’re the same!”
It’s when Take This Waltz panders to this kind
of ham-fisted moralizing so familiar to discussions of adultery
that it stumbles, and seems untrue to its nature as a film
of in-betweens, refusing to settle for easy answers.
“I
don’t like being between things,” says Margo to
a handsome stranger beside her on a plane. They flirt, disembark,
and share a cab home, where it turns out he lives a few doors
down, and so begins a flirtation that leads inevitably to
the collapse of Margo’s marriage. Later, just before
Daniel acts to precipitate a decision on her part (to leave
or stay with her husband Lou), he replies, “I don’t
think I like being between things either.” Yet neither
character is as alive to the possibilities of everyday living
as when they feel themselves at moments of suspension, a tendency
again illustrated a bit too literally by a metaphor. Towards
the middle of the film, the two meet surreptitiously at the
community pool for a wordless, one-on-one swimming session,
carefully manoeuvring around one another underwater. The scene
proceeds without dialogue until a hand touches an ankle and
the magic is broken, forcing Margo to end what, perhaps appropriately,
never feels entirely real in the context of the story.
Indeed,
Take This Waltz is strongest when it doesn’t
bother with elaborate metaphors for its characters’
emotional states, which is not to say it has no room for unreality
or imagination. Instead, its careful structure is split between
the prosaic reality of married life and the whirlwind of unreality
surrounding an extra-marital flirtation. But far from interweaving
these strands in a seamless way, the film lives off their
awkward dissonances, often following one scene of marital
dialogue unnerving for its naturalism with a flirting scene
with dialogue so unreal as to border on laughable. The effect
is jarring but also seems appropriately off-kilter--–
one is constantly trying to find one’s footing between
the two narratives, and so kept in the kind of perpetual motion
in which it’s difficult to form any kind of moral position.
Same goes for the dissonances between characters -- Margot’s
husband, a chef, is eminently definable by profession, sedentary
and entirely housebound; Margot’s flirtation, Daniel,
is an artist-cipher who somehow pays for his modest suburban
Toronto digs as a rickshaw-driver in the mornings, is hardly
ever seen indoors, and is constantly in motion. He and Margo
always meet and talk on the run, and their outings –
poutine in the park, ride on the mixer, synchronized swim
in the pool – have the same unreal quality as their
dialogue.
It’s
the naturalistic quality of Margot’s married life that
redresses any imbalance, an achievement made even more remarkable
considering the film’s decor, which, from the pretty
girl with the bangs (baking cookies in the fuzzed-out opening
shots, no less), to the bright-coloured wall paper, to the
charmingly gay swimming instructor in tight bathing suit,
constantly flirts with the unreality of so many indie films.
Yet each time the film finds a way to redeem itself. The cookies
we later learn might be a last-effort to save a failing relationship
and a means to evoke another relationship, in which food preparation
played a major part, long since lost, the coy indie sweetness
made bitter by experience. The bright-coloured house competes
with the constant odour of Lou’s chicken, which, like
marriage, is as pleasant and reassuring as it is redundant
and predictable. And after the hilariously gay instructor
makes Margo pee her bathing suit, a remarkable shower scene
shows a female swim class split into two age groups, young
and old showering separately. Again, a rather ham-fisted conceit
is brought down to earth by the willingness to look equally
at the naked bodies of young and old -- indeed, to linger
over and, it seems, celebrate the bodies of the older women,
one vigorously scrubbing her private parts.
The
vigorous scrubbing of private parts, physical and emotional
ones, comes up again as Daniel describes vividly what he would
to do to Margo if he could -- “I’d fuck you harder
than I meant to.” He gets his chance, too, in the film’s
remarkable, if not entirely successful, coda, in which the
imagined affair suddenly crystallizes. Standing before one
another in an empty loft, Margo and Daniel begin making love
as the camera circles them, flashing through the particular
sexual and apartment-decorating stages of their relationship,
ending in a static shot of the couple on the couch, watching
TV. The ostensible point is that Margo has ended up in the
same place as before, and the transgression of the dreamy
in-between, always in motion, has given out to the static,
definable world of relationship, boyfriend, girlfriend; the
mixer has stopped, the ride is over.
In
Polley’s first film, Away from Her, a grieving
husband named Grant decides to let go of his Alzheimer-ridden
wife as he embraces her in the film’s final shot, the
camera circling them to evoke a sense of conciliatory wholeness.
In the inverse of the famous Vertigo shot, where
Jimmy Stewart has resurrected the lost Madeline (or so he
thinks), Grant has given up the hope of resurrecting his wife,
and is healthier for it. It occurs, as in Take This Waltz,
in the bright light of day, and behind it is a moment of past
adultery that Grant must now face on his own, the one thing
it seemed his wife had the hardest time forgetting. “But
you didn’t leave me,” she tells him, “which
is more than I can say for some of your colleagues.”
Margo, for her part, did leave, though she didn’t cheat,
and it’s one of Waltz’s unfortunate impulses
to punish her for it, attributing her behaviour to depression.
Perhaps it’s a sign of the times where depression diagnoses
are plentiful enough, the logical outcome of spiritually bankrupt,
bourgeois yuppiedom. But despite the need to chalk up its
character’s extra-marital interests to a cultural or
psychological lack, the film is canny enough, by opening with
a re-enactment of a centuries-old public shaming with an Adulterer
as culprit, to acknowledge this punishment as a performance.
Waltz hits enough proper steps to pass etiquette
but, like a pair of horny teenagers testing out a dance floor,
finds plenty of room to grope around.
![Canadian Tire Repair Scam [2211 boul Roland-Therrien, Longueuil] = documents-proofs](../2010_v9_n5/images/mapleleaf.jpg)
