"Bel Ami" Review by Express
FOR a heartthrob eager to prove his acting chops Bel Ami must have seemed like a no-brainer to Twilight star Robert Pattinson.
Take a well regarded literary classic, Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 novel, chuck in some serious acting talent (Kristen Scott Thomas) and play an anti-hero (read: complex character) who seduces his way to the top of Parisian society (i.e well within comfort zone). Stand back and simmer.
Well, alas, what may have looked like a hot idea on paper - Dangerous Liasons for the Twilight generation - fizzles disappointingly on the big screen. Bel Ami turns out to be silly, boring and as vacuous it’s empty-headed title character, a thick and uninteresting pipsqueak who barely opens his mouth, presumably because he has nothing to say.
In that regard you couldn’t have a greater contrast to the deliciously loquacious Valmont played so memorably by John Malkovich in Dangerous Liasons and a pointed reminder that real sex appeal and charisma comes from character and not bland good looks.
This picture conjures up no heat whatsoever, despite generous glimpses of Pattinson’s buttocks and some fine leading ladies - both Uma Thurman and Christina Ricci line up for conquest alongside Scott Thomas.
One sex scene between Thurman and Pattinson is bizarrely tortured with Pattinson squirming in agony as if he’s on the rack rather than underneath one of Hollywood’s finest. For a serial seducer, Pattinson’s Georges Duroy seems to take no pleasure between the sheets, or, frankly to give it: Thurman’s Madeleine, a society hostess who becomes his wife, gets far more excited over export figures to Algeria, which she unearths as evidence of a forthcoming war, than she ever does in bed with Georges.
You can’t really blame her as there is nothing stimulating about Georges’s company. A former soldier in the French army from a dirt poor background, he is a blandly-on-the-make gadabout with no discernible talent other than his looks.
He owes his ascent in society entirely to others, beginning with a puffed-up old army pal Charles Forestier (Philip Glenister, playing posh) who discovers Georges squandering his last remaining pennies on a woman of ill repute.
Inviting him to dinner at his home, he introduces him to the movers and shakes of 1890s Paris, including his Madeleine (Thurman), his newspaper editor boss (Colm Meaney) and wife Madame Rousset (Scott Thomas) and married charmer Clotilde (Ricci) with whom he begins an affair.
His career takes off with a newspaper column recounting his memories of soldiering in Algeria which is ghosted for him by Madeleine, a woman whose lively intelligence and passions contrast with his state of lobotomized indifference.
What follows is a cautionary tale that sees Georges make strategic conquests of powerful women while casting aside the woman he seemingly cares for most, Clotilde, although evidence of genuine feeling is sorely lacking. At the same time he finds himself outmaneuvered in a wider political drama (clumsily integrated) involving his editor and the French government.
He’s a distinctly unappealing character, commanding not a jot of sympathy thanks in part to a lazy screenplay that makes no effort to properly explore and reveal the character, leaving all the work to the poor actor who plays him; and as swoony as he may be Pattinson is just not up to the task of bringing Georges to life.
Even as a lothario he fails to excite having to make no apparent effort to seduce, as if he was simply doused in eau de Viagra. Ultimately, there’s no reason to care about him or anyone else. The one sympathetic character, Clotilde, nicely played by Ricci, receives too little screen time to involve us.
The picture is handsomely staged and easy-on-the-eye but never establishes a fluent pace or tone, while the general point of the story escaped me.
Verdict 2/5
Source => Express / Via => Spunk Ransom
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