In the film Unfaithful, the cheating wife is shown becoming less and less capable as a partner and as a mother, in direct proportion to her growing infatuation with her lover. (This Adrian Lynne remake of Chabrol is a creaking affair – haha – which nicely casts Richard Gere as the creepy jealous husband and Kylie’s French ex-squeeze Olivier Martinez as the lover to Diane Lane). So, for example, Lane falls asleep in Martinez’s arms; with the result that she’s late to collect her child from his posh school (like we haven’t all done this for no very good reason now and then). She impulsively abandons her (not very onerous) wifely duties and diverts to the city, only to catch Martinez with another woman and attack him in a jealous fit. She invents spurious charitable projects and lies about them to creepy Gere. (Sorry, but I even found him creepy in Pretty Woman; in fact, he’s always been too creepy for the romantic leads he’s been given; whereas he was perfectly cast as a devious, vicious and corrupt cop in Internal Affairs). Worst of all, our anti-heroine burns the dinner!
Those who haven’t seen it, may think I’m exaggerating. But no – I swear, the burning of the dinner gets more time than any other misdemeanor (apart from the glossy sexual encounters, of course – Lynne’s speciality). In the world of the film, this is the crime passionale – and not Gere’s later murder of her lover. What is really beyond the pale, apparently, is to mistreat your partner’s food. (And yet – once more – how many of us do this to our partner’s dinner without the excuse of a hot affair to distract us?) I only mention it because the camera lingers in sustained close-ups on the smoking pan – and even follows the leads into the dining room to watch her apologise to creepy Gere for slightly tougher than usual chicken. Hey, it’s fiction – they made it up – and she can be abducted by aliens if the scriptwriters so desire. But she isn’t, of course; because they wish to stay firmly within a recognizable, contemporary suburban world.
Well, excuse me – but in that contemporary world, not everyone automatically fails as a partner or mother or cook, just because they’re getting some extra cock! No surprise that the film made me want to shout, "Referee!" In fact, if you’re not pretty damn good at multi-tasking, better not play away in the first place. My own Cutie-pie has never been afflicted with this strange difficulty. It’s a very intense – and very physical – connection between us. It’s not as if she doesn’t take time out of her life for us, or spend time thinking about me:
You must excuse me; I need to have a bath and fantasise about being with the man of my dreams next weekend.
Although even she admits that it’s hard sometimes:
I'm glad it's not just me that finds the love powerful, precious, and tender. I've never known anything like it either. As you say, it's way beyond sex or romance. It is hard to manage along with a demanding life. But wonderful.
Yet manage she does: she juggles, she multi-tasks, she prioritises (mostly she prioritises her family – quite rightly, but much to my irritation). She finds a balance, I suppose. So one email might be about her need for anal sex:
I want you to fuck me in the arse again so badly. It's very pleasurable for me and makes me feel like - nothing... That doesn't translate well, I know. It stops time. Is that clearer?
Another might be about her diligence in the kitchen:
Tomorrow I'm baking. I truly am a Domestic Goddess though with less glamour and more tupperware than Nigella. At least I don't have an arse which has to be shot in soft focus or behind large objects.
or:
You would love my place today. I played house all evening yesterday, post-barbeque, getting it clean so I could spend today cooking. There is just so much food ready to eat. I had to cook two chickens but I had vegetarian children for tea and we are eating out tomorrow, so I have two cold chickens, one of which I stuffed under the skin with coriander, chillies, ginger, garlic and lime, which will keep us going for a day or two. And I made double quantities of lunch and tea so there are enough meals to please anyone.
Motherly duties are not abandoned, you see – in fact, they dovetail nicely with trysts for sex. She’s more than happy to grab a seeing-to while the kids are at Cubs, or in their music lessons. Taking them there provides for some private time - and earns brownie points with him indoors. We don’t need hours at it – we do some chit-chat, we fool around, we fuck - she comes, I come. I drive her back to her vehicle, or to wherever she’s arranged to collect her kids – and she’s on time. It’s not that hard. And she’s not even involved in complicated lies and pretence – she did a bit of shopping, she went for a coffee, she called in at work…..
In fact, the whole business of being loved-up – cherished and wanted, adored and desired (not to mention the actual rogering) – seams to energise her. In the couple of weeks before a recent threesome we’d arranged, she reported unusual levels of capability, even for her:
I hope you wake up tomorrow feeling better... I have been the opposite. I have had so much energy. I have kept myself really really busy. But still, somehow, found time to dwell on my excitement.
And last week, for example, I saw her at the flat we’re using for an hour and a half – while she was ostensibly back at work, catching up with some outstanding matters there. I pulled her clothes off in no time, licked her out, fingered and fiddled with her until she climaxed; and then, after some face-fucking, I came on her tongue. Then we fooled around some more, I fucked her good – and we both came again. I’d picked her up at her work at 8.30 – and I deposited her again, fairly satisfied, I hope – back at her work car park, just after 10pm. No children were abandoned, no risky lies were necessary, and definitely no dinners burnt during this activity.
On the contrary, about half-past midnight, she emailed me and told me all the things she’d done since she got in. Far from burning the dinner, she seemed to have gone into housewife overdrive:
Darling
Sorry it's so late.
This is what I have done since coming home:
Washed - and dried - two loads of washing
Made a cake
Made bread
Made soup
(because it's the first day of the holidays and I want them to have nice snacks and a favourite lunch).
Washed the salad compartment of the fridge
Cleaned the cooker
Unloaded and re-loaded the dishwasher
Sometimes even I am stunned into silence by my domestic goddess-osity.
(Interestingly, although it’s quite a close remake of the French film, Unfaithful differs from the Chabrol original. It also departs from other fictions – John Updike’s work, for example – exploring similar territory; that is, the sexual mores of middle class suburbanites in New York and New England. We might say that in the Chabrol film, (La Femme Infidele), the wife is gratified by her husband’s possessiveness and that the act of violence restores their relationship; though her acceptance of her culpability and collusion will not save him from justice. In Unfaithful, on the other hand, we feel that the wife’s ‘moment of madness’ (a literal and figurative fall which initiates the affair) plunges the couple from their idyllic existence into a purgatory of deception, guilt, mutual recrimination and fear of discovery. Their shared closing fantasy of escape together to a Mexican beach may, like the original, suggest that the wife finally accepts the husband's possessive love instead of being horrified by it; but it is also unconvincing: an excess of female desire has destroyed them both. The suburbanites John Updike shows us inhabit an earthly, fallen paradise of compromises and delights. No such subtleties for Adrian Lynne’s protagonists, who thus end up in a hell of their own making.)
Those who haven’t seen it, may think I’m exaggerating. But no – I swear, the burning of the dinner gets more time than any other misdemeanor (apart from the glossy sexual encounters, of course – Lynne’s speciality). In the world of the film, this is the crime passionale – and not Gere’s later murder of her lover. What is really beyond the pale, apparently, is to mistreat your partner’s food. (And yet – once more – how many of us do this to our partner’s dinner without the excuse of a hot affair to distract us?) I only mention it because the camera lingers in sustained close-ups on the smoking pan – and even follows the leads into the dining room to watch her apologise to creepy Gere for slightly tougher than usual chicken. Hey, it’s fiction – they made it up – and she can be abducted by aliens if the scriptwriters so desire. But she isn’t, of course; because they wish to stay firmly within a recognizable, contemporary suburban world.
Well, excuse me – but in that contemporary world, not everyone automatically fails as a partner or mother or cook, just because they’re getting some extra cock! No surprise that the film made me want to shout, "Referee!" In fact, if you’re not pretty damn good at multi-tasking, better not play away in the first place. My own Cutie-pie has never been afflicted with this strange difficulty. It’s a very intense – and very physical – connection between us. It’s not as if she doesn’t take time out of her life for us, or spend time thinking about me:
You must excuse me; I need to have a bath and fantasise about being with the man of my dreams next weekend.
Although even she admits that it’s hard sometimes:
I'm glad it's not just me that finds the love powerful, precious, and tender. I've never known anything like it either. As you say, it's way beyond sex or romance. It is hard to manage along with a demanding life. But wonderful.
Yet manage she does: she juggles, she multi-tasks, she prioritises (mostly she prioritises her family – quite rightly, but much to my irritation). She finds a balance, I suppose. So one email might be about her need for anal sex:
I want you to fuck me in the arse again so badly. It's very pleasurable for me and makes me feel like - nothing... That doesn't translate well, I know. It stops time. Is that clearer?
Another might be about her diligence in the kitchen:
Tomorrow I'm baking. I truly am a Domestic Goddess though with less glamour and more tupperware than Nigella. At least I don't have an arse which has to be shot in soft focus or behind large objects.
or:
You would love my place today. I played house all evening yesterday, post-barbeque, getting it clean so I could spend today cooking. There is just so much food ready to eat. I had to cook two chickens but I had vegetarian children for tea and we are eating out tomorrow, so I have two cold chickens, one of which I stuffed under the skin with coriander, chillies, ginger, garlic and lime, which will keep us going for a day or two. And I made double quantities of lunch and tea so there are enough meals to please anyone.
Motherly duties are not abandoned, you see – in fact, they dovetail nicely with trysts for sex. She’s more than happy to grab a seeing-to while the kids are at Cubs, or in their music lessons. Taking them there provides for some private time - and earns brownie points with him indoors. We don’t need hours at it – we do some chit-chat, we fool around, we fuck - she comes, I come. I drive her back to her vehicle, or to wherever she’s arranged to collect her kids – and she’s on time. It’s not that hard. And she’s not even involved in complicated lies and pretence – she did a bit of shopping, she went for a coffee, she called in at work…..
In fact, the whole business of being loved-up – cherished and wanted, adored and desired (not to mention the actual rogering) – seams to energise her. In the couple of weeks before a recent threesome we’d arranged, she reported unusual levels of capability, even for her:
I hope you wake up tomorrow feeling better... I have been the opposite. I have had so much energy. I have kept myself really really busy. But still, somehow, found time to dwell on my excitement.
And last week, for example, I saw her at the flat we’re using for an hour and a half – while she was ostensibly back at work, catching up with some outstanding matters there. I pulled her clothes off in no time, licked her out, fingered and fiddled with her until she climaxed; and then, after some face-fucking, I came on her tongue. Then we fooled around some more, I fucked her good – and we both came again. I’d picked her up at her work at 8.30 – and I deposited her again, fairly satisfied, I hope – back at her work car park, just after 10pm. No children were abandoned, no risky lies were necessary, and definitely no dinners burnt during this activity.
On the contrary, about half-past midnight, she emailed me and told me all the things she’d done since she got in. Far from burning the dinner, she seemed to have gone into housewife overdrive:
Darling
Sorry it's so late.
This is what I have done since coming home:
Washed - and dried - two loads of washing
Made a cake
Made bread
Made soup
(because it's the first day of the holidays and I want them to have nice snacks and a favourite lunch).
Washed the salad compartment of the fridge
Cleaned the cooker
Unloaded and re-loaded the dishwasher
Sometimes even I am stunned into silence by my domestic goddess-osity.
(Interestingly, although it’s quite a close remake of the French film, Unfaithful differs from the Chabrol original. It also departs from other fictions – John Updike’s work, for example – exploring similar territory; that is, the sexual mores of middle class suburbanites in New York and New England. We might say that in the Chabrol film, (La Femme Infidele), the wife is gratified by her husband’s possessiveness and that the act of violence restores their relationship; though her acceptance of her culpability and collusion will not save him from justice. In Unfaithful, on the other hand, we feel that the wife’s ‘moment of madness’ (a literal and figurative fall which initiates the affair) plunges the couple from their idyllic existence into a purgatory of deception, guilt, mutual recrimination and fear of discovery. Their shared closing fantasy of escape together to a Mexican beach may, like the original, suggest that the wife finally accepts the husband's possessive love instead of being horrified by it; but it is also unconvincing: an excess of female desire has destroyed them both. The suburbanites John Updike shows us inhabit an earthly, fallen paradise of compromises and delights. No such subtleties for Adrian Lynne’s protagonists, who thus end up in a hell of their own making.)
