Adore

An excellent movie. It's full of temptation, passion, guilt, innocence, confusion and love. I don't know what the big fuss is about age differences. Everyone in it was of legal age. I adored this movie.

A movie about terrible narcissistic people living in a fantasy world of privileged isolation is actually not all that scandalous. The acting by the leading ladies is good and the photography and score are impressive. It is intriguing, but at the same time quite frivolous.

Sort of anti-climatic. Of all the movies there are made...I feel it's easy to pick this one out as a waste and rather could have stayed a book, but it is unique at least. The subject matter was handled in a way that expanded past the major issue and explored a "what if?" situation in a hopeful light about lasting friendship, though strange.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

The first thing the movie “Adore” makes you want to do is book a flight to Seals Rock, New South Wales, Australia, to see the blue drenched waters, green mountains and hills, sun baked beaches and homes to die for, a Paradise on earth and the film does a good job of advertising the place and the surroundings. Lil (Naomi Watts) and Roz (Robin Wright) have been best friends from childhood and still are after each has been married, with Lil now a widow and Roz’s husband, Harold (Ben Mendelsohn) taking a job in Sidney expecting the family to join him. Lil has a son Ian (Xavier Samuel) and Roz a son, Tom (James Frecheville) both at the end of their teens ready to take their place in the world. In the sensual surroundings they live in, it is not long before each mother is having an affair with the other’s son. Based on a short story by Doris Lessing, and a screenplay written by Christopher Hampton, the latter doesn’t know quite how to get into the story and the director, Anne Fontaine, seems afraid to tell a 2013 story, instead making it a film that Todd Haynes would have told in the 1990s or Douglas Sirk in the 1950s, both who would have gone deeper into the ramifications. While there is no darkness in the film neither is there a light touch that could have made it more meaningful. We have come a long way from “The Graduate” and Mrs. Robinson but “Adore” is stuck in that era. The supporting players, such as Mendelson, a potential suitor her own age for Lil, Gary Sweet, and girlfriends for both boys played by Jessica Tovey, and Sophie Lowe, work hard but the writer and director don’t seem to take the circumstances seriously and the shock value is almost nil. It is stuck between the possibility of farce and how lives would be affected by the adults decisions. Watts, Wright, Samuel and Frecheville offer a lot of eye candy for both sexes and do the best they can with the material they are given. The film moves too slowly at points and should have been cut by 10-15 minutes but the work of the cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne is worth the price of admission. The city of Seal Rocks should give him surfing rights for his lifetime.