And then there's director Adrian Lyne's attention to detail: just as Connie (Diane Lane) decides to go up to Paul's (Olivier Martinez) apartment, an available cab drives by. Later, when he asks her - over the phone - if she would like some coffee, she falters and puts her coffee on top of the payphone before replying that, yes, she would (since she doesn't have one now, you can see her telling herself).
I see that Diane Lane was nominated for Best Actress, and for that I'm happy. (I can't speak to Nicole Kidman winning for her performance in The Hours; I haven't seen it.) Connie Sumner's conflicting emotions were uncomfortably clear, without a word being spoken. The audience was a voyeur as I rarely feel these days. (Yes, moviegoers are always voyeurs, but doesn't it often feel more like your own private performance? Sad really.) Uncomfortably real, I say, because I must be doing something naughty to witness such expressions on the face of a woman who isn't my wife (or so my thoughts go). And that was just the train ride. :-)
In looking at the writing credits, my thoughts drift back a few years to Eyes Wide Shut, and, specifically, men writing women. While Eyes Wide Shut still puzzles me, it's Alice's (Nicole Kidman) pot-laced monologue that still haunts the married man in me (taken from The Kubrick Site):
ALICE: That afternoon you and I made love and talked about our future, and our child. Later we were sitting on the balcony and he passed below us without looking up. Just the sight of him stirred me deeply and I thought if he wanted me, I could not have resisted. I thought I was ready to give up you, the child, my whole future.
And yet at the same time - if you can understand it - you were dearer to me than ever, and I stroked your forehead and kissed your hair, and at that moment my love for you was both tender and sad.
At dinner I wore a white rose and you said I was very beautiful. It might not have been just an accident that he and his friends sat near us. He didn't look up but I actually considered getting up, walking over to him and like someone in a movie, saying, "Here I am, my love, for whom I have waited - take me."
Well, it was about then that the waiter brought him the envelope. He read it, turned pale, said goodbye to his friends - and glancing at me mysteriously, he left the room.
ALICE stops for a moment.
ALICE: I barely slept that night and woke up the next morning very agitated. I didn't know whether I was afraid that he had left or that he might still be there... But by dinner I realised he was gone and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Long silence
BILL: And if he hadn't left?
ALICE doesn't reply.
ALICE: I don't know.
Those who've seen Unfaithful (2002) can see the similarities: a woman so consumed by a man that she forgets to pick up her child after school, introduces so much stress in her family that he starts wetting the bed. I find myself wondering whether this could happen, more because it's men writing these women than anything utterly fantastic in their actions; do these men - Raphael and Kubrick in the case of Alice; Chabrol, Sargent and Broyles Jr. in the case of Connie - have it right? Or are they writing the women they'd be, the ones they've loved, listened to, questioned, the ones they've read?
I don't have any answers to these questions. I do know women who liked this movie a lot. Certainly another of Lyne's movies, Nine ½ Weeks, has been recommended to me by both men and women, and seems to deal with the sexes. (Again, I haven't seen it, so I can't comment further.) Am I making too much of the mothering instinct? Children are abandoned, neglected and worse every day. Comments?
