Other than a brief scene of chemical keratoconjunctivitis in Kickass (hairspray in the eyes), there has been a dearth of eye-related movie content on DVD and in theaters lately. Since we've covered the tired theme of chemical irritation several times (Bolt, Made of Honor, Did You Hear About the Morgans?), I had to resort to HBO to come through with Unfaithful from 2002, starring Diane Lane, and directed by Adrian Lyne. Lyne also directed Flashdance, Fatal Attraction, and Indecent Proposal.
I guess marital infidelity flicks are Mr. Lyne's specialty, and Unfaithful depicts a tragic family implosion sparked by adultery. What appears to be an ideal and secure home life proves stifling for suburban housewife Connie Sumner, and her New England manor and even-keel husband can't compete with the exciting, care-free city life offered by French book dealer, Paul Martel. You can almost connect the dots here with a standard story about the bored housewife, intriguing foreigner, suspicious husband, private investigator, etc, etc. There's a shift at the end of the second act that steers the plot in a different direction than I was expecting, and for as standard as the rest of the movie is, the power of the directing and acting ultimately produces something more intriguing than it should be.
The downtown loft-dwelling home wrecker, Paul Martel, has more in his bored-housewife seducing toolbox than just a French accent, toned abs (see photo), and inappropriate public displays of affection. Among the piles of books in his apartment, there is a copy of a book in Braille in the kitchen, and one of his pick-up techniques involves taking Connie's hands in his and drawing them over the pages as he "reads" the words. From Wikipedia:
The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write. Braille was devised in 1821 by Louis Braille, a blind Frenchman. Each Braille character or cell is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle containing two columns of three dots each. A dot may be raised at any of the six positions to form sixty-four (26) possible subsets, including the arrangement in which no dots are raised.
The Braille system was based on a method of communication originally developed by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleon's demand for a code that soldiers could use to communicate silently and without light at night called night writing. Barbier's system was too complex for soldiers to learn, and was rejected by the military. In 1821 he visited the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, France, where he met Louis Braille. Braille identified the major failing of the code, which was that the human finger could not encompass the whole symbol without moving, and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another. His modification was to use a 6 dot cell — the Braille system — which revolutionized written communication for the blind.
Interestingly, Braille literacy statistics show that 50% of legally blind people were able to read Braille in 1960, and this has dropped to around 10% today. Technological advances and budgetary constraints have been cited as some possible reasons. I have never met a visually impaired person who could actually read Braille. This lack of Braille fluency is kind of reflected in the movie, since Paul Martel (who is not visually impaired, by the way) just makes up what he is "reading" with Connie.
Unfaithful is a well-acted and produced movie, with occasionally nuanced moments that rescue it from a movie-of-the-week descent. A few scenes of peculiar pacing and heavy-handed directing are balanced by a restrained exploration of motive. It will remind you of "The Stranger" in a movie form. Let's give Unfaithful a big Braille B .
