Unfaithful, and the Goodbye No One Let Her Keep

The first thing that happens to Connie Sumner is weather. It is a windy day in SoHo, she is out shopping, and a gust of wind knocks her into a young Frenchman. She falls and grazes her knee. He takes her up to his flat to see to it, and as she leaves he presses a book on her. At home she opens it and finds his telephone number inside. She calls him.

Nothing in her life has pushed her there. She lives comfortably with her husband, Edward, and their eight-year-old son, Charlie, in Westchester County, outside New York, and the marriage is a generally happy one. Edward is not a cold man. She is not neglected, and she is not unhappy. The film gives her a gust of wind, and it declines, to the end, to give her anything else.

Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful, released in 2002, is often remembered as an erotic thriller, and sometimes as a morality play about a wife who strays and what it costs her. This essay reads it as a film about decisions, and about whose they are allowed to be. The film honours Connie’s first decision, to want a stranger, without asking her to justify it. Then, on the day she forgets to collect her son from school, she makes a second decision: to end it. A good deal of what follows is the story of what becomes of that second decision.

It does not survive. How it is lost belongs after a warning, but the shape of the argument can be given now. In this story Connie’s yes is received, and her goodbye is not allowed to stand. That imbalance, more than the affair itself, is what the film is about, and it runs all the way to the last shot, which leaves two people in a stopped car in front of an ending that neither of them has chosen yet.

This essay discusses the whole film, including how it ends. It also discusses violence, which it states plainly and never describes. If you would rather meet the film first, this will keep.

The record first. Unfaithful was directed by Adrian Lyne from a screenplay by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles Jr., released by 20th Century Fox, and it is a remake of Claude Chabrol’s La Femme infidèle of 1969. Diane Lane plays Connie, Richard Gere plays Edward, Olivier Martinez plays Paul Martel, a twenty-seven-year-old French book dealer, and Erik Per Sullivan plays Charlie. The film opened in the United States in May 2002. Lane won the best actress awards of the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle for the part, and was nominated for the Academy Award.

In outline: after the collision in SoHo, Connie calls Paul, and on her third visit to his flat they dance and become lovers. Soon she is inventing excuses to see him, and Edward begins to find out. Then comes the day Connie forgets to collect Charlie from school and resolves to end it. What follows is taken up below, in order.

Begin with what the film declines to supply. Stories about a wife who strays often arrive with a reason already packed: a husband who no longer looks at her, a marriage gone cold, a loneliness the story can point to. The reason does two jobs at once. It excuses her, and it convicts somebody else. A wife who was neglected is a wife with grounds, and a husband who neglected her had it coming.

Lyne has said that this is precisely what he refused. Speaking to the A.V. Club twenty years after the film, he recalled “a feeling from the studio at that time that they had to have a bad marriage in order for the relationship to work. But there would’ve been no drama in that at all.” What interested him was that it was a good marriage, and that she had no reason at all for the affair and had one anyway. He liked, as he put it, “the arbitrary thing of that.”

The refusal matters more than it looks. An explanation would have taken Connie’s desire away from her and handed it to Edward’s failings. By giving her no grievance, the film leaves the want where it began, with her, and it leaves Edward blameless for it. Charles Taylor, reviewing the film for Salon when it opened, praised Lane for exactly this: she does not pass judgment on Connie, he wrote, “by making the affair a compulsion, and thus an aberration.” Her wanting is nobody’s symptom and nobody’s punishment. It is hers.

The film shows the want rather than explaining it. The nearest it comes to an account is the ride home on the commuter train after the first afternoon, when Lane’s face runs from delight at her own daring to dread and back; and that is a feeling, not a reason.

This Library’s essay on Esther Perel’s book about affairs, “The State of Affairs and How to Ask Why Without Calling Betrayal Harmless”, reports her finding that an affair is often less about what a marriage lacks than about something the person who strays is looking for in themselves. Unfaithful does not reach even for that. It lets Connie want without a theory, and it asks the viewer to stay beside her before deciding anything about her. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who counts Chabrol’s original among its director’s greatest films, admitted in the Chicago Reader that for roughly the first half of the remake he was pleasantly surprised, “especially by the decisive shift in emphasis from husband to wife.”

None of this says she was right to act on the want. The film does not pretend that acting on it is free: it takes excuses, and a lie her husband catches. But the film keeps apart two things that stories usually run together, the wanting and what she does about it, and the rest of this essay stands on that separation. If her wanting needed no reason, neither does her decision to stop.

The film gives Edward’s side its full weight, and it is worth staying with how he finds out, because the way a person learns something is part of what is done to him. He notices new lingerie. He catches his wife in a lie. Then the news arrives from the worst possible direction: from Bill Stone, an employee he has just fired for disloyalty, who has seen Connie kissing Paul in a diner and throws it back at him. Look at your own family, the man tells him.

What Edward does with the suspicion is hire a private detective. The photographs devastate him. It is easy, watching a thriller, to hurry past this on the way to what he does next, and it should not be hurried. A man who has been living inside his own marriage learns that it has been rewritten without him, and he learns it from a sacked subordinate’s taunt and a stranger’s camera. The essay on Perel’s book put the injured person’s position exactly: reality has been secretly edited around them, and they did not consent to being taught through it.

What Edward does next, the film keeps back for a while. By the time it shows us, Connie has made a decision of her own.

The turn comes on an ordinary afternoon. Connie forgets to collect Charlie from school. That is all this essay will say of him: it is the day she decides to end the affair.

Look at what kind of decision it is. It is not one that anybody forces on her. She makes it alone, for her own reasons, out of what she has just seen of her own life. It is, in other words, exactly as free as the decision to call Paul had been. If the film was right to honour the first, it owes the same honour to the second.

And she carries it out, in her own voice, twice over. Once to Paul’s face: she goes to his building, sees him with another woman, confronts him in a fury and tells him it is over. And once in a message left on his machine, in tears, ending it.

This Library has read the opposite case. In “Second Virgin, and Falling in Love With Your Eyes Open”, a woman decides on a flight home to end an affair and cannot make the decision hold; her want outlasts her resolve. Connie’s case is harder to watch, because her resolve does hold. What fails is everyone else’s willingness to let it.

When she tells Paul it is over, he forces himself on her in the hallway, and after a struggle she stops resisting. That is sexual assault. This essay will not describe it.

Ceasing to struggle is not consent, and the afternoons that came before do not stand in for it. A yes she gave on other days answered those days; it was not a standing permission, and on this day she had come to take back even what was left of it. It is not passion. It is not the affair’s last and fiercest chapter, the place where thrillers like to put such a scene. It is the moment her ending is overruled by force.

Where it falls in the story matters. It comes at the precise point at which Connie has taken her life back into her own hands, and it takes it out of them again. The first of her two goodbyes is spoken to a man who refuses it.

Edward arrives just after she has gone, and Paul lets him in. Edward sees the unmade bed. On a shelf he sees a snow globe, one he once gave to Connie. He strikes Paul with it and kills him.

That is all this essay will say about the act itself. A gentle husband and a devoted father kills another man in a moment, with a present he once gave his wife. Nothing in this essay reads it as justice.

The object is worth a second look, because the film chose it. A gift is a sentence one person writes into another person’s life. To find it on a stranger’s shelf is to find your sentence quoted in someone else’s story. Chabrol’s original used a large cigarette lighter, a third-anniversary present from husband to wife, found at the lover’s bedside. Lyne’s version makes it a snow globe: a small sealed world in which the weather never changes. It is hard not to remember that this film began with a gust of wind.

Then the second goodbye. As Edward cleans up, he hears Connie’s message, tearful, ending the affair. It was meant for Paul. It reaches her husband instead, when nothing he has done can be undone, and he erases it. Later he disposes of the body.

Set the two goodbyes side by side. She ended the affair to Paul’s face, and he overruled her by force. She ended it in her own voice on his machine, and her husband wiped it out. Why he erased it, this essay will not guess beyond the obvious: the message tied his wife to the dead man. Whatever the reason, the effect is the same. The one record of her decision is gone. In this film the only ending that holds is the one that should never have been made.

Now the secret changes hands. Detectives come asking about Paul, whose estranged wife has reported him missing. Connie learns only then that he was married, and tells them she hardly knew him. His body is found.

For a stretch of the film the Sumners live under one roof with two secrets, each kept from the other and both kept from the police. She is hiding a lover. He is hiding a killing, and the fact that he knew about the lover. Critics who disliked the second half noticed the shift. Taylor wrote that in the second half “the point of view shifts to Gere’s Edward as he finds out about the affair.” Rosenbaum’s pleasure in the first half had been its turn toward the wife. Both are describing a structure, and the structure is the argument: the film passes the secret from her to him, and makes the audience keep it with each of them in turn.

The mirror is exact. Before the killing, Edward is the one who finds things: lingerie, a lie, a stranger’s photographs. After it, the finding passes to Connie. Each of them is, in turn, the one keeping a secret and the one discovering it. The English title names one of them by what she did. By the end the film has given the other a secret at least as large.

Connie finds the detective’s photographs of her and Paul in Edward’s jacket, and the snow globe back on their shelf at home. She understands.

What Edward says when she confronts him is the most painful speech in the film. He breaks down. He has worked for his family. She is ungrateful. And it was her, he says, that he wanted to kill.

The grief in it is real, and it deserves to be honoured. He has lost the marriage he thought he had, and he has done something that cannot be undone. But look at what the speech does with the facts. It turns a killing into something she brought about, and his years of work into a debt she failed to pay. The essay on Perel’s book offered a test for accounts like this one: “Explanation should increase accountability by making choices legible. If it reduces accountability, it has become public relations.” And the last clause should be heard for what it is. Whatever else it is, grief or rage or confession, a husband telling his wife that she was the one he wanted to kill is making a threat, and a woman who hears one owes it no charitable reading.

Days later she finds something else in the globe, hidden: an old photograph of the family, and his words to her, calling her the best part of every day. The tenderness of the years before has been sealed inside the thing he killed a man with. The film puts the love letter and the weapon in the same glass.

She burns the pictures of herself and Paul. Edward says he will turn himself in, and she begs him not to. Of all her decisions about how this is to end, it is the only one that nobody overrules.

In the last scene, Edward stops the car at a red light. Connie imagines them fleeing abroad under new names, and he agrees, and comforts her as she cries. The car is waiting outside a police station. There the film ends.

It could have ended otherwise, and very nearly did. Chabrol’s film ends with the husband telling his wife that he loves her and going out to speak to the detectives, while the camera draws away from her and their son. Lyne, according to an Associated Press report when the film opened, shot a different ending at the urging of 20th Century Fox, which felt audiences needed a more straightforward resolution; after preview screenings with the studio’s version, he switched back at the last minute to the uncertain one. “I always sort of hankered after that ending, so eventually, I got my way,” he said. He thought it “treated the audience with some intelligence,” and that it would start an argument, “which I like.”

So the ending is a choice, made, by its director’s own account, over the studio’s preferred one, and it deserves to be read as one. A red light holds the two of them still, by a rule that neither of them made. The police station is right there. Behind them is everything each of them has done; in front of them is a decision. Whatever they do when the light changes will be, as far as this story goes, the first decision they make together, and the film declines to show it.

Diane Lane, promoting the film, described her director this way: “He’s a poll taker. He likes people to expose themselves in their reaction to a film.” The last shot is the poll. What a viewer wants the Sumners to do at that light says a good deal about what she thinks a marriage is for.

Here the film meets an argument this Library has taken seriously. The essay on Perel’s book reports one of her more provocative claims: that some marriages become more honest after an affair is disclosed and worked through, not because the affair was good, but because the crisis forces a directness about desire and disappointment that long marriages rarely reach any other way.

By the end of Unfaithful the Sumners are more honest with each other than they have ever been. Each knows the worst thing the other has done. And the honesty repairs nothing. It binds them. What they share now is not a truth that sets them free to choose. It is a secret that works only if both of them keep it. “Closer, and Confessing Everything Without Being Known” argued that telling everything and being known are different acts. The Sumners arrive at a third thing: knowing everything, and being held in place by it.

“Asura, and a Place to Say It Without Losing” followed women who knew and would not say, because to say it to a husband’s face was to open a contest they could only lose. Connie lives the reverse. She says it, twice, to her lover’s face and on his machine, and she loses both times. By the end everything has been said, and the saying has left the two of them not freer but more tightly bound.

And there is somebody outside the car. Paul had an estranged wife, and it was she who reported him missing. Whatever the Sumners decide at that light, they are deciding it about a death that belongs to other people too. The essay on Perel’s book put the purpose of understanding in one sentence: “to prevent mystery from becoming destiny while leaving every person free to decide what happens after the truth.” At the red light the Sumners are free to decide. Paul’s wife has no say at all.

The strongest objection to Unfaithful, made when it opened, is that for all its sympathy it is a punishment story. Taylor put it most sharply. In the second half, he wrote, Edward is “the good man driven to extremes, and we’re meant to understand that it’s Connie who’s placed him in that position.” As the film turns into a thriller, “Connie becomes the movie’s Pandora”; for Lyne, a woman in an adulterous affair is “a catalyst for disaster.” Behind the charge stands Lyne’s Fatal Attraction of 1987, which Taylor called “practically a brief for right-wing notions of sexuality and family values.”

Not everyone saw it that way. Writing for Screen Slate ahead of a 35mm screening in Brooklyn in 2022, Stephanie Monohan read the film almost as a corrective to Fatal Attraction, one that lets Lane’s “performance of guilt mixed with desire speak for itself instead of judging Connie’s behavior.” Richard Gere, promoting the film in 2002, said that there were “no villains” in it.

Both readings describe something real. The film does invite the Pandora reading: in its second half the camera stays with Edward, and the viewer is asked to feel his devastation and to fear for him. But look at where the harm in this story actually comes from. What happened in the hallway was Paul’s doing. The killing was Edward’s, and so was the erasure. Connie’s desire hurts people, Edward first among them, and the film does not hide it. It kills no one. To say that she placed him in that position is to move his act into her account.

What the film does to Connie is harder to name than punishment. She is not killed, not exposed, not cast out. She is kept. She keeps her house and her husband, and she keeps them by keeping his secret. If that is a punishment, it is a peculiar one: not a death but a life, lived on the terms she chose at the one moment her choice about an ending was allowed to stand. This essay does not call it a verdict. It is a consequence, and consequences are not verdicts. The film hands them out without passing sentence on anyone, Edward included, and this essay follows it there.

In Japan the film opened on 11 January 2003 as Unmei no Onna, the woman of fate, and a Japanese film site introduced its director as a maker of erotic suspense, Fatal Attraction among his films. The English title names an act. The Japanese title names a type, and the type has a history. Unmei no onna is one Japanese rendering of the French femme fatale, as Artwords, the art-terms dictionary of the Japanese site artscape, notes; for its meaning, the dictionary quotes the Larousse: in this essay’s translation, a woman with a charm that seems to have been sent by fate to ruin the man who falls in love with her.

Read that way, the Japanese title and Taylor’s Pandora reach the same figure from opposite sides of the Pacific: the woman as the source of the ruin. The film’s events do not fit it. The ruin in this story is done by men’s hands, and by the end the husband’s own ruin is the work of his own hands. The title can also be heard more gently, as the woman of one’s destiny, the one the wind brought, and for its first half the film is exactly that story. Then it turns into the other one. Whatever was meant by it, the Japanese title holds both. It also does, in a single phrase, what the essay on Perel’s book warned against: it turns a mystery into a destiny.

A familiar kind of story tells an affair the other way round, reason first: it begins with a marriage that has gone without sex, and follows two people who come to want each other. That is one honest way to tell it: with a reason. The studio behind Unfaithful wanted another, a reason with a culprit attached, in a bad marriage. Lyne’s way is the rarest of the three: no reason, no culprit, and a wife who wants anyway. A viewer used to the first two may find the third the hardest to forgive, precisely because it gives Connie nothing to excuse her wanting with.

One thing in the film may be close to home for many readers in Japan: the train. Connie lives in the suburbs and her lover in the city, and the line between them is where the film puts some of its most admired minutes. Anyone who lives far out along a commuter line into Tokyo, in Saitama or Chiba or wherever the trains run, knows the shape of such a day: the house at one end, the city at the other, and between them a stretch of time in which nobody at either end can see her face.

The ending has something to say, too, to a reader who has moved countries. Connie’s last fantasy is another country and other names, as though a change of country could make a person someone else. A woman who has really made such a move, whose days in Japan now pass in a language that was not her first, may know what the fantasy leaves out. A new country does change some things. Her name is said differently; there may be things she can say in the new language that she could never say in the old. What it does not change is what she brings with her. The Sumners imagine arriving somewhere as strangers. Anyone who has done it may already know that one arrives as oneself.

Now the case against, made as strongly as it can be.

First, the ending. This essay has read the red light as a choice, and Lyne’s own account supports that. Rosenbaum saw something else: a remake that reflects nothing but “a lot of anxiety about test marketing,” and so “takes a nosedive when it goes shopping for an ending.” He counted several endings, all of them, in his word, ham-fisted. An ending chosen to start an argument is also an ending chosen after previews, and Lane’s picture of her director as a poll taker cuts both ways. The suspension this essay admires may be a studio’s hedge dressed as a question. A question asked for commercial reasons is still a question; but the objection stands.

Second, the erasure. This essay has read Edward’s deletion of the message as the second taking of Connie’s goodbye. A reader may fairly say that it is nothing of the kind: he was getting rid of evidence, and her decision never came into it. That may well be so, and nothing here rules it out. The reading offered is about what the erasure does, not about what he meant.

Third, the refusal to explain. This essay has called the film’s silence about Connie’s reasons a kind of respect. It could as easily be a convenience. A want without a reason is a want the film never has to think about: it becomes weather, a device to set the plot moving, and a woman whose inner life is left blank can be filled with whatever the viewer brings. Monohan’s phrase for Lane’s Connie, “warmth and unknowability,” is praise, but unknowability can also be a way of not looking. The answer attempted here is that Lane’s performance fills the blank the screenplay leaves. That answer credits an actor, not the film.

Fourth, the dead man. For all its attention to the marriage, this essay has given Paul very little: a man who did what he did in the hallway and was then killed. What he did does not make his killing smaller, and nothing he did made his death deserved. A reader may think that an essay which declines to moralise about either spouse has simply found it easier to leave the third person out. His estranged wife, who reported him missing, gets a sentence or two here. That is not enough, and it is noted.

Last, against this essay’s own balance. To honour Connie’s desire and decline to moralise about either spouse may look like a comfortable middle that dodges the question a betrayed reader would ask first: what Connie owed Edward before any of this began. The film shows the lies. This essay has named them and moved on. A reader who has been lied to in a marriage may find that too quick, and she would not be wrong.

Three things, stated plainly.

A want does not need a reason to be real. The absence of a grievance does not make desire false, and a grievance would not have made it truer. Stories that insist on a reason are usually asking whose fault it is, which is a different question.

A decision to stop deserves the same respect as a decision to begin, and it belongs to the person who makes it. “It’s over” is a complete sentence. Overruling it by force is violence, whatever else it is called. Erasing it, for whatever reason, takes away the record that she said it. Neither is love, and neither is passion.

Honesty is not the same as repair. Knowing each other’s worst can be the start of a truer marriage or the terms of a hiding place. What decides which is what the knowledge is used for, and whether the people outside the car stay in view.

If you once ended something in your own words and found that your ending was not allowed to stand, talked over, pushed past, quietly undone by someone who decided it did not count, it was still yours. You said it. That it was refused tells you about the people who refused it, not about whether you meant it. And if you are carrying a want with no grievance behind it, in a life that is by most measures fine, the want is not proof that something is wrong with you or with your marriage. Nor does it decide anything for you. What you do with it is yours to decide, and the want needs nobody’s permission to be real.

This is a reading of a film. It is not clinical, legal or therapeutic guidance. It diagnoses no one, the characters included, and nothing in it is advice about any reader’s marriage.

The film was not screened for this essay. It rests on the published record of the film and its credits; on interviews its director and actors gave when it opened and later; on reviews from the time and since; on the award bodies’ own lists; and on the record of its Japanese release. Lines of dialogue are paraphrased, never quoted as exact. Where a critic, the director or an actor is quoted, the words are theirs as published. Nothing here is a statement about the private life of any performer.

If this story touches something that has happened to you, that is a matter for a person rather than an essay. In Japan, #8891 connects free of charge to the nearest one-stop support centre for victims of sexual crime and sexual violence; each centre keeps its own hours. For violence between partners, the Cabinet Office’s Domestic Violence Hotline Plus takes calls in Japanese around the clock on 0120-279-889, and its chat service, open from noon to ten at night, works in ten languages. In an emergency, call 110.

No director, writer, performer, critic, publication or award body named here has any connection with this publication, and none has endorsed it.

If a want of yours arrived with no reason attached, would you trust it less, or only find it harder to explain?

When you have ended something, who heard it, and did they let it stand?

What would you want the Sumners to do when the light changes? What does your answer say about what you think a marriage is for?

Is there a truth in your life that has brought you closer to someone, and one that has only tied you together?

In the story you are living, who is outside the car, and do they have a say?