The Fast Lane of Seduction

Bel Ami

DIRECTOR: Declan Donnellan, Nick Ormerod

CAST: Robert Pattinson, Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christina Ricci

Rating: **

Given where Robert Pattinson is at professionally and personally, take them and leave them may just be what the doctor ordered. Only it is Pattinson we are talking about here, the guy with the scowls, smirks, flaring nostrils and half-shuttered eyes who never leaves the vague twilight ways of Stephenie Mayer for the vaguer, greyer worlds of Guy de Maupassant.

And that's despite the women he beds —1890 French high-society wives played by Thurman (as Madeleine Forestier), Thomas (as Virginie Rousset) and Ricci (as Clotilde de Marelle). With the censor merrily and incessantly snipping the much-talked-about steamy sex of Bel Ami, Pattinson's charms as a pretty, penniless soldier taken in by these women are doubtful at best and dubious at worst. And since he consistently falls behind on the task of invoking the frustration and pain of a poor, talentless man such as him wanting to be an intrinsic part of Paris's charmed circle, Bel Ami fails to ever rise. It feels inept in its inconsistent attempts to frame the whole story within the politics of that time, of France's growing invasions into Africa and the opposition within.

It's Madeleine's husband Charles who takes in Georges Duroy (Pattinson) first. Charles knows him from the war and offers him a job at the paper he works in. Madeleine thinks of a column Georges could write evoking the loneliness of a soldier fighting in distant lands and even ghost-writes for him. It is in the Forestier home that Georges meets Virginie and Clotilde. As Georges makes no bones about where he would like his relationship with Madeleine to proceed, she gently pushes him in the direction of the young Clotilde.

... contd.

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