Based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, we are transported to 1947, when a middle-aged English professor (Jeremy Irons) goes to teach French literature in a small New England town and rents a room in the house of a widow (Melanie Griffith), but he only really decides to stay when he sees her daughter (Dominique Swain), a 14-year-old teenager to whom he is totally attracted. Despite not being able to stand the young woman's mother, he marries her, just to get closer to the object of his passion, as the attraction he feels for his stepdaughter is devastating. The young woman, in turn, shows to be quite mature for her age. While she is at a summer camp, her mother is run over by a car. Unhindered, her stepfather travels with his stepdaughter and tells everyone that she is his daughter, but in privacy she behaves like a lover. However, she has other plans, which will generate tragic events.
Following a cadenced atmosphere to guide his work, Adrian Lyne brings here a daring film about the synthesis of human sexuality and its inconsistencies. 'Lolita' brings in its substance numerous concepts, such as the notion of the past as a structure rooted in man, the flexibility of morality and the harmfulness of obsession, always striving to expose how human life and chance walk together.
The film begins by showing some fragments of the central character's childhood and adolescence, exposing his pleasures and ambitions. This flash forward is important to highlight the similarities Lolita would have with her childhood sweetheart and also to better introduce the character to the audience. Then, we will jump to his arrival at the house where he intended to live, getting to know the woman, the owner of the house, named Charlotte, and her daughter Dolores, a girl in her early teens. This past, once pleasurable, with the exacerbations of an individual's joys, acts as a solidified structure in the character's psychic construction. The man seems, before knowing and substantiating his passion for the teenager, to live in the shadows of these pleasant experiences of his youth. And it is at this point that the figure of the teenager fits into the resurgence of excitement for life on the part of the character. Dolores ends up making the man feel alive again, making him able to glimpse the glow of happiness he had in an already distant past. In view of this opportunity, the man ends up putting out a more instinctual side, without caring about the consequences, developing a relationship with the figure of the innocent teenager. And the figure that could get in the way of this relationship is Charlotte's character.
The 1997 feature had two very difficult barriers to overcome, the first, of course, being the difficult, daring and, in the end, disgusting raw material developed in the famous homonymous novel that Vladimir Nabokov published in 1955 and the second, the inevitable comparisons to the first film adaptation of the book by none other than the great and inimitable Stanley Kubrick in 1962. There were actually three barriers and the third was Adrian Lyne himself and the kind of reputation he ended up building for himself with his filmography, in which eroticism reigns even though this is the most superficial layer of all his work.
After all, once labeled as such or as roasted by critics and audiences avid for this kind of shallow approach, it is very difficult to escape the expectations generated and Lolita, by Lyne, of course, had everything to be a hot erotic novel in which a middle-aged man falls in love with a 14-year-old nymphet. As Lyne has never made erotic films just for the sake of eroticism, that wouldn't change here. On the contrary, the highly incendiary story of Nabokov gets a solemn, period treatment, beautifully photographed and with performances by the main duo that, I would say without fear of mistake, rival and perhaps surpass those of James Mason and Sue Lyon in the sixties feature.
In this version, Irons and Swain are formidable. It's hard to believe that the actress was practically a rookie at the time (her only previous work was a cameo in The Other Face and she, unfortunately, never had other opportunities of this size) such is her dedication and her ability to metamorphose between an innocent child a 14-year-old and a precociously mature 14-year-old with a literal facial change or gesture. Irons, on the other hand, develops his Humbert Humbert with such emotional fragility that we sometimes forget that what he does is absolutely hideous and unforgivable. The moment he first sees Lolita in the garden of Charlotte Haze's (Melanie Griffith in an often underrated role, but one that I consider better than Shelley Winters's as the same character), her dour husk is immediately torn apart and It's fascinating - and disgusting - to see this transformation on camera that continues in a crescendo that drives him to obsession, violence and madness. There is good chemistry between Irons and Swain, with good complicity in fun and romantic moments, generating due tension in the most conflicting moments.
Lyne doesn't do a remake of Kubrick to begin with. That would be cinematic sacrilege and he knew it. The screenplay that journalist Stephen Schiff wrote for his theatrical debut is a new adaptation of Nabokov's novel, one in which the "romantic" aspect of the relationship between literature professor Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons) and young Dolores "Lolita" Haze (Dominique Swain) is highlighted, with the acid humor of the original narrative, which Kubrick adopted, being completely muffled. In addition, Lyne, without the prior censorship that Kubrick faced and which he was very displeased with at the time, it is worth remembering, had more space to work on more explicit sequences, but, it is worth noting, maintaining his usual elegance in scenes like this. After all, contrary to what perhaps the popular imagination has wrongly fixed on the basis of images repeated ad nauseam all over the place, Lyne was never vulgar, never truly explicit. On the contrary, the filmmaker has always approached the act of having sex with extreme good taste and a lot of technique.
But it's more than evident that Lyne's approach automatically becomes much riskier when we talk about a subject as thorny as pedophilia, because that's the background of Lolita, be it the book, the Kubrick movie, be it. The nineties version. Irons was 49 at the time, while newcomer Swain was still a 17-year-old posing as a 14-year-old character (the age Kubrick used is repeated here, as the young woman is 12 in the novel) and The 32-year difference between the actors is an insurmountable chasm in any respect when one of the parties is that young, even more so in fiction, of course. Lyne knew this and, precisely because he is aware of the issue, what we see being visually contemplated in the film goes in a slow crescendo, with the director first testing the ground, only to deal much further with the carnal connection between the characters. Characters and, even so, in a considerably discreet way, with the use of the beautiful soundtrack composed by Ennio Morricone, punctuating, simultaneously, the romance and the perversion of what we see.
The usual accusations that Lolita is an immoral work in any of its incarnations reveal a misunderstanding of the basics or the simple fact that those who claim this have not read the novel or seen the movies. Like the works of Nabokov and Kubrick, Lyne's film very clearly condemns what Humbert Humbert does, without relativizing, without pushing some of the "blame" onto Lolita even considering her manipulations. By the way, by stripping the film of the acid humor subtext that Kubrick printed, including giving enormous prominence to Peter Sellers and his comic Clare Quilty, Lyne prints an even more caustic tone that leads to the mutual destruction of all the characters. His Quilty, played by a Frank Langella always in the shadows, takes on haunting contours and establishes a welcome, albeit light, layer of thriller throughout the film that strongly influences Humbert's spiral of paranoia, with a final clash between the two that It has beautiful surrealist contours.
Adrian Lyne's Lolita is the essence of the word "nymphet", and everything it means. Humbert (Jeremy Irons) is the typical passionate romantic and the images that follow perfectly illustrate the plot. The soundtrack is light, romantic and the film's photography lulls you into a dream, from which we never want to wake up. Lolita (Dominique Swain) is always seen by us viewers through Humbert's vision, and she always appears painted on canvas as a goddess. Her movements, gestures and words are highly natural and romantic in front of Lyne's camera lens, which is always in the right place at the right time. This version is a criminally underrated and forgotten film. More than that, it deserves to be rediscovered and re-appreciated in retrospect.
Undoubtedly, it is a difficult and unpleasant work due to the subject it covers, but, at the same time, it is an impressive sign of maturity from a director who, unfortunately, has always suffered - and still suffers - from the irremovable labels with which they once decided to mark it.
Following a cadenced atmosphere to guide his work, Adrian Lyne brings here a daring film about the synthesis of human sexuality and its inconsistencies. 'Lolita' brings in its substance numerous concepts, such as the notion of the past as a structure rooted in man, the flexibility of morality and the harmfulness of obsession, always striving to expose how human life and chance walk together.
The film begins by showing some fragments of the central character's childhood and adolescence, exposing his pleasures and ambitions. This flash forward is important to highlight the similarities Lolita would have with her childhood sweetheart and also to better introduce the character to the audience. Then, we will jump to his arrival at the house where he intended to live, getting to know the woman, the owner of the house, named Charlotte, and her daughter Dolores, a girl in her early teens. This past, once pleasurable, with the exacerbations of an individual's joys, acts as a solidified structure in the character's psychic construction. The man seems, before knowing and substantiating his passion for the teenager, to live in the shadows of these pleasant experiences of his youth. And it is at this point that the figure of the teenager fits into the resurgence of excitement for life on the part of the character. Dolores ends up making the man feel alive again, making him able to glimpse the glow of happiness he had in an already distant past. In view of this opportunity, the man ends up putting out a more instinctual side, without caring about the consequences, developing a relationship with the figure of the innocent teenager. And the figure that could get in the way of this relationship is Charlotte's character.
The 1997 feature had two very difficult barriers to overcome, the first, of course, being the difficult, daring and, in the end, disgusting raw material developed in the famous homonymous novel that Vladimir Nabokov published in 1955 and the second, the inevitable comparisons to the first film adaptation of the book by none other than the great and inimitable Stanley Kubrick in 1962. There were actually three barriers and the third was Adrian Lyne himself and the kind of reputation he ended up building for himself with his filmography, in which eroticism reigns even though this is the most superficial layer of all his work.
After all, once labeled as such or as roasted by critics and audiences avid for this kind of shallow approach, it is very difficult to escape the expectations generated and Lolita, by Lyne, of course, had everything to be a hot erotic novel in which a middle-aged man falls in love with a 14-year-old nymphet. As Lyne has never made erotic films just for the sake of eroticism, that wouldn't change here. On the contrary, the highly incendiary story of Nabokov gets a solemn, period treatment, beautifully photographed and with performances by the main duo that, I would say without fear of mistake, rival and perhaps surpass those of James Mason and Sue Lyon in the sixties feature.
In this version, Irons and Swain are formidable. It's hard to believe that the actress was practically a rookie at the time (her only previous work was a cameo in The Other Face and she, unfortunately, never had other opportunities of this size) such is her dedication and her ability to metamorphose between an innocent child a 14-year-old and a precociously mature 14-year-old with a literal facial change or gesture. Irons, on the other hand, develops his Humbert Humbert with such emotional fragility that we sometimes forget that what he does is absolutely hideous and unforgivable. The moment he first sees Lolita in the garden of Charlotte Haze's (Melanie Griffith in an often underrated role, but one that I consider better than Shelley Winters's as the same character), her dour husk is immediately torn apart and It's fascinating - and disgusting - to see this transformation on camera that continues in a crescendo that drives him to obsession, violence and madness. There is good chemistry between Irons and Swain, with good complicity in fun and romantic moments, generating due tension in the most conflicting moments.
Lyne doesn't do a remake of Kubrick to begin with. That would be cinematic sacrilege and he knew it. The screenplay that journalist Stephen Schiff wrote for his theatrical debut is a new adaptation of Nabokov's novel, one in which the "romantic" aspect of the relationship between literature professor Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons) and young Dolores "Lolita" Haze (Dominique Swain) is highlighted, with the acid humor of the original narrative, which Kubrick adopted, being completely muffled. In addition, Lyne, without the prior censorship that Kubrick faced and which he was very displeased with at the time, it is worth remembering, had more space to work on more explicit sequences, but, it is worth noting, maintaining his usual elegance in scenes like this. After all, contrary to what perhaps the popular imagination has wrongly fixed on the basis of images repeated ad nauseam all over the place, Lyne was never vulgar, never truly explicit. On the contrary, the filmmaker has always approached the act of having sex with extreme good taste and a lot of technique.
But it's more than evident that Lyne's approach automatically becomes much riskier when we talk about a subject as thorny as pedophilia, because that's the background of Lolita, be it the book, the Kubrick movie, be it. The nineties version. Irons was 49 at the time, while newcomer Swain was still a 17-year-old posing as a 14-year-old character (the age Kubrick used is repeated here, as the young woman is 12 in the novel) and The 32-year difference between the actors is an insurmountable chasm in any respect when one of the parties is that young, even more so in fiction, of course. Lyne knew this and, precisely because he is aware of the issue, what we see being visually contemplated in the film goes in a slow crescendo, with the director first testing the ground, only to deal much further with the carnal connection between the characters. Characters and, even so, in a considerably discreet way, with the use of the beautiful soundtrack composed by Ennio Morricone, punctuating, simultaneously, the romance and the perversion of what we see.
The usual accusations that Lolita is an immoral work in any of its incarnations reveal a misunderstanding of the basics or the simple fact that those who claim this have not read the novel or seen the movies. Like the works of Nabokov and Kubrick, Lyne's film very clearly condemns what Humbert Humbert does, without relativizing, without pushing some of the "blame" onto Lolita even considering her manipulations. By the way, by stripping the film of the acid humor subtext that Kubrick printed, including giving enormous prominence to Peter Sellers and his comic Clare Quilty, Lyne prints an even more caustic tone that leads to the mutual destruction of all the characters. His Quilty, played by a Frank Langella always in the shadows, takes on haunting contours and establishes a welcome, albeit light, layer of thriller throughout the film that strongly influences Humbert's spiral of paranoia, with a final clash between the two that It has beautiful surrealist contours.
Adrian Lyne's Lolita is the essence of the word "nymphet", and everything it means. Humbert (Jeremy Irons) is the typical passionate romantic and the images that follow perfectly illustrate the plot. The soundtrack is light, romantic and the film's photography lulls you into a dream, from which we never want to wake up. Lolita (Dominique Swain) is always seen by us viewers through Humbert's vision, and she always appears painted on canvas as a goddess. Her movements, gestures and words are highly natural and romantic in front of Lyne's camera lens, which is always in the right place at the right time. This version is a criminally underrated and forgotten film. More than that, it deserves to be rediscovered and re-appreciated in retrospect.
Undoubtedly, it is a difficult and unpleasant work due to the subject it covers, but, at the same time, it is an impressive sign of maturity from a director who, unfortunately, has always suffered - and still suffers - from the irremovable labels with which they once decided to mark it.