Adore

Adore

“Adore” is “good trash,” as my mother used to say when she was talking about Sidney Sheldon novels.

Director Anne Fontaine shoots in lush 35mm Cinemascope, and her otherworldly coastal wonderland a secluded, idyllic nook of New South Wales in Australia where the rules of civilized society don’t apply has never looked more exquisite. It’s sun and sand and surf and seemingly no responsibilities, all of which cause the beautiful people who live there to behave badly.

But! The people playing them are respected actresses: Naomi Watts and Robin Wright. And the adapted screenplay comes from a respected writer: Christopher Hampton (who won an Oscar for adapting “Dangerous Liaisons”). The pedigree of the players somewhat obscures what tawdry guilty pleasure this movie is.

Watts and Wright co-star as Lil and Roz, respectively: lifelong best friends who have frolicked on these shores and shared secrets since they were children. Now in their mid-40s, they still are. They both stayed in their hometown and live just a couple doors away from each other in stylish beachfront homes.

And so while they have maintained this neat parallel, their sons have grown up as best friends, too. Lil’s son Ian (Xavier Samuel) and Roz’s son Tom (James Frecheville) run along that same sliver of sand and ride those same pounding waves together; through a series of clever edits by Fontaine we see the passage of time through ritual from one generation to the next.

Flash forward to present day. The boys are now men in their early 20s or so. The moms hang out frequently with their sons, having drunken dinners on the deck as they dance under the setting sun. Lil’s husband died when Ian was just a boy; Harold (Ben Mendelsohn), Roz’s husband, teaches drama at Sydney University and often is away for weeks at a time. (Mendelsohn, an actor who often brings a sense of danger to his roles, doesn’t get much to do here.)

But these lingering evenings have more than a hint of double date about them; you can feel the ogling and yearning as the mothers say their sons are like gods among us (a line taken from the Doris Lessing novella that inspired the film). And indeed, these young men played by actors who have physiques that are bronzed and blessed are handsome, muscular creatures often photographed without shirts.

You can see where this is headed.

Roz’s fling with Ian begins quite organically in the middle of the night during one of those sleepovers that happens when one son passes out at the other’s house. Meanwhile, Tom initiates his affair with Lil out of spiteful revenge but it quickly becomes something more.

They all know this cross-generational swapping is wrong; “We’ve crossed a line,” Lil tells Roz in what is meant to be an understatement. And yet and yet! It can’t be wrong if it feels so right, to borrow from Debby Boone. There’s no room for camp here, though; Fontaine treats the love scenes which continue for years with a seriousness that eventually turns into melodrama.

Desire masquerading as a statement of feminist liberation is “Adore.” It’s also about the importance of staying sexy and alive in your forties rediscovering yourself after years of being defined as someone’s wife or mother. Blonde and jockish, Lil (Naomi Watts) and Roz (Robin Wright) are not only both vibrant but also similar enough in their looks and ways to be sisters, which adds just enough of an implied incest element to make “Adore” that much ickier.

Still, it’s rare to find stories about what older women want told with such closeness or care. As they admit that time has caught up with them, Watts and Wright bring both great dignity and relatability to these parts; you can see how alive the affairs make each character feel for themselves. (The sons’ motivations are murkier, mostly because the characters are pretty much interchangeable slabs of hunk.)

But everything is so pretty too pretty here, from the surroundings to the tanned-toned-flesh inhabitants, who frequently seem like specimens in some lab-designed hybridization experiment that would eventually yield Ryan Gosling. So many trappings! So many bodies! This movie is basically high-end soft-core porn you’d watch on Cinemax late at night, except with Oscar winners/nominees.

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