garwy

as a result of going to a cinema with a number of trainee staff i ended up seeing this film as part of a double-bill with the new seann william scott squirmcom 'mr. woodcock'. i don't usually watch seann william scott films unless you nail me to the seat - but on this occasion the two films were a useful contrast.

both 'mr. woodcock' and 'and when did you last ...' are basically films about young men who obsess about a parent's sex-life. 'mr. woodcock' plays this theme as a gross-out comedy - and makes for very uncomfortable with few laughs. 'and when did you last ...' instead opts for pathos, so the film is only uncomfortable.

'and when did you last ...' will appeal to a certain type of determined viewer of British films. there are lovingly reconstructed vignettes of 1950s middle-class Britain (the eldest son's eyes light up when his family gets a new maid: 'meat!' he thinks), careless praise of English sangfroid (to take their minds off the cuban missile crisis father and son go camping), and more masturbation (tastefully presented) than you see in most of the 'american pie' movies.

but it didn't appeal to this viewer, who thought it was very nearly a paradigm - in its careless snobbery, its prurience, its feyness, and its casual misogyny - of what has been wrong with British film for most of the last twenty years, and apparently shows no hope of improving.

(Maybe spoilers?) Forget the trivial sideplot which has Diane Lane getting her kit off, this is a film about American Businessman Richard Gere killing a smelly frenchy and dumping his body on a landfill site.

It has about nothing to do with Claude Chabrol's Femme Infidele (where it stole the elements of its plot). In Chabrol the murder is deliberate (but Richard Gere is such a hunk he just can't help killing wimpy French guys), and the wife's cover-up is motivated by complex but finally selfish thinking. (Diane Lane doesn't seem able to do motivation - at least not in this film).

'Unfaithful' is xenophobic, shallow, predictable, and its sex-scenes are calculatedly disgusting. It is a Richard Gere film.

Basically 'Unfaithful' is what is wrong with Hollywood.

gavcrimson's summary is full enough that there is little to add to it; except to comment that there are so many films of this nature which are conscientiously dishonest that it comes as a shock to realise how easy it would have been to show these stories as they really are.

London's miserable weather is captured to perfection, so is the dirtiness of the city, how lonely it is, and how no-one ever seems to be at home there.

this is a peculiarly muted film, and i don't really know of anything else quite like it; but people who see it on the title (or for the photographs on the publicity)are going to be as disappointed as the characters in the script.