REVIEW - ADORE

The film formerly known as Two Mothers, or Perfect Mothers, or The Grandmothers. At least one of those titles is correct. Anne Fontaine is handed here a plum story of sun, sons and salacity from Doris Lessing's novel, and an ostentatious screenplay by Christopher Hampton. It's a ravishing melodrama, and a handsome black comedy too, and she makes of it a prim, pristine picture postcard. For a story so devoutly emotional, she's regrettably preoccupied with glamour - the lapping azure sea, the gleaming interiors, the soothing sunlight, the array of extraordinary torsos on profuse display. There are hundreds of cologne commercials in Adore, one after another, making it an enjoyable experience for thirty seconds or so before the mind begins to wander. She should have cranked this shit up to eleven. A writer as talented as Hampton turns in dialogue this grandiose, this cumbersome, and you don't take the hint? It needs a thundering Maurice Jarre score, not mild contemporary chamber music. Never mind that Fontaine is French... in fact, if there's any nation that knows how to stage histrionic pomp, it's the French. She's not entirely to blame - the film suffers from its structure, being required to fulfill two functions simultaneously: to create satisfactory dramatic arcs in its individual time periods, and to create one for the film as a whole. The episodic arrangement works on the page, where it may take you weeks to absorb the book entire, and a change of date may replenish your interest. But in cinema, it does not, as every 20 or 30 minutes we're shuffled briskly onward a few years, and it feels like we're back at square one. Since the purpose of Adore appears to be to showcase the talents of leads Naomi Watts and Robin Wright, they respond with gutsy performances, finding choice moments to interject with sprinkles of sense and sensibility to combat Hampton's crass splendour and Fontaine's tone-deafness, which are ever-ready to cut right back in and undermine all their hard work. There's a spectacularly ugly shot toward the end, so offensive it looks like bad photoshopping, and it's as if Fontaine's had enough of degrading the film this ought to have been, and so sets about degrading the film she's made instead.