There’s something undoubtedly worthwhile in Anne Fontaine’s Adore: the performances of Naomi Watts and Robin Wright. Despite the often risible dialogue semi-plagued with contrived insights and dumb soap opera one liners, the two actresses achieve quite a few moments of stirring emotions and genuine feelings. They seem to know they are dealing with bad dialogue, and nonetheless they get by. That said, the rest of Adore is completely forgettable.
Lil (Naomi Watts) and Roz (Robin Wright) have been best friends since childhood, they are so close that some think they are “lezzos,” and have two gorgeous surfer sons, Tom (James Frecheville), and Lil’s son, Ian (Xavier Samuel), who are also very close, yet nobody thinks they are gay. Lil is a great-looking widow whereas the equally great looking Roz is married to a rather ordinary guy. And very likely because the women are entering middle age while the boys are in their early twenties, all of a sudden they start sleeping with the other’s son. Not only that, they fall in love too. And it all takes place in an idyllic Australian beach town hours away from Sydney.
So what do you make of such an ambitious premise? A stern drama? A romantic comedy? An extravagant melodrama? An auteur film with no predetermined blueprint?
A mix between comedy and melodrama would probably be the safest bet, considering you have the right screenwriter-director team. But Anne Fontaine and her screenwriter Christopher Hampton decided not to go all Almodóvar-like, and instead to deliver an uncompromising drama. Or so they must have wished, since the end result is far from dramatic. In fact, it’s so flimsy that it’s not even funny.
For starters, the respective love affairs never ring true since the reasons why and how they fall in love are never dramatized. What had been brewing before in the characters’ hearts and souls is not once explored. Love just happens from one scene to the next. Likewise, the boys’ characters are so underwritten that sometimes you forget who’s sleeping with whom, as they are not really individuals, but interchangeable sexual figures. By the way, the fact that the sex scenes are trite and lack so much eroticism is not of much help either.
Then the many potential angles this story provides, namely what’s going to happen to the women’s lifelong friendship, how the boys will now see their mothers as the other’s object of desire, what new emotional entanglements will surface, or what will happen to a 20-year marriage, all these possibilities with great pathos remain largely unexplored. There’s no time to delve into them as an ongoing series of episodes mistakenly take the place of cohesive and coherent narrative. So what you have now is a dumb and shallow soap opera filled with big meanings and phoney sentiments.
When and where
Adore (Australia/France, 2013). Directed by Anne Fontaine. Written by Christopher Hampton, based on the short story The Grandmothers, by Doris Lessing. With Naomi Watts, Robin Wright, Xavier Samuel, James Frecheville, Sophie Lowe, Jessica Tovey, Gary Sweet, Ben Mendelsohn. Cinematography by Cristophe Beaucarne. Editing by Luc Barnier, Ceinwen Berry. Running time: 110 minutes.
