Freud and Kinsey would have field days with Adore, a raging libido of a film from the presumptively provocative French director Anne Fontaine. Instead of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, the major players in Fontaine’s new sexual roundelay Roz (Robin Wright) and Lil (Naomi Watts) and Ian (Xavier Samuel) and Tom (James Frecheville) — two mothers and — gasp! — their sons. No, it’s not that gross; the moms, longtime best friends, are sleeping with each others’ teenage boys.
In fact, it’s not gross at all. It’s a windswept, beachfront fantasy on a massive estate in New South Wales, where life is a peachy paradise of surfing, suntans and sex. All four players in this wicked game are perfectly proportioned specimens; the two young men are presented shirtless in their opening scene — two classical hunks with sculpted bodies, the camera lingering on every lat and pec while the mothers, not yet tempted to jump in the sack, use phrases such as “they’re like young gods” and describe the boys’ “unearthly aura.”
Resistance is futile: The encroaching love affairs are as telegraphed as a tropical storm as it plods across the Caribbean. But what about Lil and Roz’s unusual closeness? As much as they’re pulled toward their nubile offspring, they also seem magnetically attracted to each other.
Adore is mommy porn without the porn. There aren’t any shades of gray here, let alone 50; it’s all quite obvious, as black-and-white as a ’30s melodrama. Granted, Fontaine knows how to film an arousing sex scene without the necessity of nudity or exploitation, as followers of her previous filmography can testify. But the best moments in Adore are the calm before the storm, the smoldering sexual tension exchanged in furtive, as-yet-unsatisfied glances, conveyed by four actors able to translate internal struggles and unspoken desires with novelistic subtlety (the book is based on British writer Doris Lessing’s novel The Grandmothers).
When the ladies begin to enjoy the pleasures of their sons’ bodies — fleshing out a mutual agreement that lasts years, until new dramas threaten their strange couplings — the pleasure of the movie all but evaporates into an ocean of drippy contrivances. There are other characters besides these four, but all are given the shortest emotional shrift: Roz’s husband Harold (Ben Mendelsohn), who receives an offer to teach drama in Sydney, accepts his wife’s vague refusal to leave their home, and promptly vanishes into oblivion, re-emerging in the narrative years later with a new partner and child.
The boys, who grow into young men, find lovers their own age but remain physically and psychically tethered to their respective moms, even after rearing children themselves. Fontaine’s film is about a quartet of people caught in a skipping record of their devising — an endless feedback loop of irrational lust and love, damn the victims they leave in their wake.
This is supposed to provoke and trouble the audience, but instead I simply marveled at the emptiness of this entire film, the rampant immaturity of all four people, and the lack of anything that might be called a character arc. Wright, who brings a quiet dignity to a movie that has none, becomes the only impetus to keep watching. Watts, who worked very hard to waste her talent earlier this year in The Impossible, should be looking for a better agent.
More than once while watching Adore, I thought of Paul Schrader’s recent release The Canyons, which also catalogued the ravenous sexual appetites of colleagues in an opulent setting, in this case Los Angeles. At least in that film, I think the director and writer, Bret Easton Ellis, knew their movie was about the vacuity of young people and Hollywood in general, and manages to comment on it. Adore is stone-cold serious, and that’s what makes it such a failure.
ADORE. Director: Anne Fontaine; Cast: Naomi Watts, Robin Wright, Xavier Samuel, James Frecheville, Ben Mendelsohn, Jessica Tovey, Sophie Lowe; Distributor: Exclusive Media; Rated R; Now playing at Living Room Theaters at FAU