***
Cast: Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, Melanie Griffiths
Director: Adrian Lyne
Rating: R18
Review: Russell Baillie
What a dirty raincoat couple of weeks it seems to have become down at the local multiplex.
Firstly, folks have been flocking to see Tom'n' Nicole grope about for higher meaning in the dreary Eyes Wide Shut.
Now, having been shelved for two years in the United States awaiting a distributor brave enough, and weathered a storm of controversy across the Tasman (because they do that sort of thing so well there), the second film of Lolita finally arrives here.
In the first, Stanley Kubrick adapted Vladimir Nabokov's classic as a black comedy chaste enough to keep the censors of the time off his back.
In the second, Adrian Lyne - a worrying candidate for the job given a trashy repertoire which includes 9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal - takes it reverently back to the original text.
Which, strangely, makes for quite a good movie It's one that is certainly tied - pace-wise often tediously - to the page. And one where some of Lyne's glossy visuals tend to undo the restraint he shows elsewhere, especially when it comes to the intimate scenes between Irons' Humbert and Swain's (or her body double's) title character.
But it still offers a convincing portrayal of Humbert's obsession and the reasons for it, as well as the 14-year-old object of his affection's canny response to it.
Irons, of course, has done the self-loathing, repressed English obsessive so many times that it's initially hard to see the quirks or much depth of his Humbert. But it emerges eventually.
Swain is quite something, convincing in her mix of teen gawkiness and wily nymphet and obviously deserving of a better career than that of her screen predecessor, Sue Lyon.
There's a surreal humour around the edges, some of it conjured by the American hinterland the pair traverse by car while Humbert slowly realises his awful folly.
It has flaws aplenty, like Griffiths' silly turn as Lolita's mother and Frank Langella's equally cartoonish and largely incidental Quilty (Humbert's rival, played memorably by Peter Sellers in the Kubrick version).
But all things considered, here's a reasonable but mannered film taken from a famous book. And no raincoat required.
Lolita
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