In October 2021 I watched Unfaithful on Hulu and Devil in a Blue Dress on Criterion.
I’ve seen Unfaithful a couple of times, and always liked it, but got more into the second half of the movie. I never had liked that part before, because I didn’t like that it turned into a murder cover-up story instead of more confrontation about the affair that led up to it, but now I liked it. The first half of the movie is Diane Lane having her sexytimes affair and jeopardizing her comfortable marriage and feeling conflicted and guilty over it, but still going back to it, and the second half is Richard Gere killing her lover in an act of passion and feeling horrible about it afterwards. This feels more evident when he’s struggling to get rid of the body and he’s trying to lift and carry a limp dead body wrapped in carpet and is clearly in over his head with this.
I didn’t know that the film is a remake of a Claude Chabrol film from the 60s, but it makes sense. Adrian Lyne directed this more like a French domestic drama than an American film, and despite that it’s from 2002, it feels more 1990s for some reason. I like the slow and measured pace of it, how it has sexy scenes that are layered with a lot of mixed emotions of lust, anger, and guilt, and how well and mature that Diane Lane played these scenes, that made her more complex than just wanting to cheat on her husband for cheap thrills. And I like that Richard Gere isn’t made to be an abusive or neglectful jerk to excuse her cheating, he’s a decent ordinary guy who quickly picks up on his wife’s different vibes and has suspicions about it, he’s not a complete fool. And I like how in the end, it is still not really complete, like the audience can fill in what happens next with this story they would feel like a big local true crime story.
Devil in a Blue Dress was an incredible noir film, I had missed it when it was on Hulu, and caught it on Criterion. I had seen Carl Franklin’s One False Move, and liked how even with a bigger budget and Denzel Washington as the star, it still carried over those themes from the previous film of overt racism, uncomfortable violent scenes, handheld camera for action scenes, and having this genuine rawness to it. It’s a story in which Washington plays a guy in 1948 Los Angeles who is struggling for work and is tapped by gangster Tom Sizemore to find a woman (Jennifer Beals) who is dating a mayoral candidate, and it sends Washington on a journey that involves murder, corrupt cops, racism, and a lot of crooked business going on.
Washington was fantastic, and he just easily fit into Franklin’s work, more of a period noir film that felt more like an indie movie than Hollywood, that went a lot darker and further with some really messed-up scenes. I already knew the general story on Beals’ character, so I wasn’t surprised, but I was amazed by how great Don Cheadle was as a relative unknown at the time. He’s a friend of Washington’s who is a trigger-happy, cold-blooded killer, who just kills people on impulse, and he stole the movie and was amazing to watch as a really cold and unsettling character who could seem charming then flip in a second. He was definitely the big highlight of the movie to me.
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