Connie Sumner (Diane Lane) has been married to Edward (Richard Gere), an executive for an armored truck company, for eleven years. They live in a beautiful home in suburban Westchester, New York, with Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan), their eight-year-old son. One day while shopping in Soho, Connie is felled by a successive series of gusty winds. She lands on top of Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez), a rare books dealer who is taking care of a loft for a sculptor friend. The young and sexually confident Frenchman invites Connie up to his place so she can look after her bruised knees. Although very attracted to him, she flees the scene when he makes a romantic move.
But she soon comes back. In her third rendezvous with Paul at the loft, Connie gives in to her yearning for sexual passion. On the train back home, she replays in her mind all the juicy moments of their erotic connection. The affair that started out with hesitation soon leaps into addiction. Connie can't get enough of Paul. She even has sex with him in the restroom of a restaurant while her two women friends wait anxiously for her at the table.
Director Adrian Lyne certainly has proven to be an ambitious explorer of sexuality in his films 9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and Lolita. This retooling of Claude Chabrol's 1969 film La Femme Infidele works well as an anatomy of infidelity as sexual dishonesty in a marriage. The lean screenplay by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles Jr. shows how Connie's infidelity eats away at her intimacy with Edward and even creates distance from her son.
We're told that over half the people in marriages have affairs. Yet most couples would probably agree with Milan Kundera who in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being wrote: "Fidelity gave a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions." Edward eventually discovers the truth about his wife's unfaithfulness and responds in a way that fits his controlling nature. Unfaithful vividly conveys the false allure and the horrifying calamity of extramarital affairs.
The DVD includes an audio commentary with director Adrian Lyne and interviews with Lyne and stars Diane Lane and Richard Gere; some of this is from a "Charlie Rose" show. There is also a "making of" featurette, a piece on editing with Ann Coats, the theatrical trailer, and a selection of deleted scenes, including an alternate ending.
