Derailed English Movie
For those who think adultery is fun, here is some warning from Hollywood. Forget "Fatal Attraction" - there's worse in store.
As soon as you get comfy in a motel with a lady who looks like Jennifer Aniston - not surprising, since she's played by Aniston - a psycho barges in, rips of all your money, mugs you and rapes the lady.
Ouch! And you can't report to the cops because your lovely and devoted wife (Melissa George) would get to know what you've been up to.
Oh, dear. There's much more horror in store for family man turned adulterer Charles Schine (Clive Owen).
The beauty of the beastly plot is that it always stays a step ahead of us. We just don't know what's in store for poor Charles. One minute the luscious Lucinda Harris (Jennifer Aniston) is un-belting his trousers, the next minute the psycho Philippe LaRoche (Vincent Cassel) was there to play the spoilsport, even as his unsuspecting wife cooks dinner in the next room.
Director Mikael Hafstrom creates the contrast between domesticity and crime, between the world of white-collar normalcy and brutal criminality with compelling candour.
Stuart Beattie's writing is sharp and deep-focussed. Details in the incidental characters' lives emerge from the pastiche of pleasure and pain. The suspense is created with diligent care.
Take the sequence where Charles encounters a hooker and a cop after the evil Philippe kills Charles' friend. Such moments have a heart-in-the-mouth immediacy.
You might not be convinced by the flow of narrative energy. But you can't deny the energetic lava of devious narrative devices as they fly out of the writer's imagination in a cluster of gripping episodes.
At the end of it, any man would think thrice before plunging into extra-marital pleasures. Even if the temptress looks like Jennifer Aniston.
