Director Hytner looks at the importance of passion
JAKARTA (JP): Take a couple of everyday life relationship stories, prep them up with a Ryan or a Roberts, some Nina Simonesque blues tunes and you have yourself a fun romance blockbuster that won't make you concentrate too much.
But take director Nicholas Hytner and you get a film that stays away from this simple formula. Hartner took an idea from author Stephen McCauley's novel The Object of My Affection and etched a story from it.
The question of how dependent a permanent relationship is on sexual passion is manifested in The Object of My Affection, a movie about mature adults in good relationships making the correct decisions, but still running into problems.
Produced by Laurence Mark, the movie is well scripted by Wendy Wasserstein and defines the question with occasionally strong dialog.
Actors Paul Rudd, Jennifer Aniston (from the TV-series Friends), Allison Janney and Nigel Hawthorne (The Madness Of King George) portray human character in its most natural sense.
The movie begins with a dinner party in which George Hanson (Rudd), a gay school teacher, meets Nina Borowski (Aniston), a total stranger from whom he accidentally learns that he is about to be dumped by his boyfriend. Nina becomes sympathetic and offers him a spare room in her Brooklyn apartment.
George is heart-broken when he later learns from handsome boyfriend Dr. Joley (Tim Daly) that their relationship is over and accepts Nina's invitation.
In the months that follow, Nina and George become like family, a fact which leaves Nina's devoted boyfriend, an outspoken civil liberties lawyer named Vince (John Pankow), unsettled.
What leaves Vince even more disturbed is Nina's announcement that she is pregnant with his baby and that she wants to raise the baby with her gay roommate instead of with him.
Nina's concept of a permanent relationship is, as she tells George, taking one relationship that matters most and making it work. However, the movie progresses to show that things are not quite so simple.
The fact remains that George is gay and Nina is straight.
In one scene, Nina's stepsister Constance (Janney) points out with sheer bluntness that a relationship with a gay man whom she is not even sleeping with is a "one-way ticket to nowhere".
Nina retorts back that Constance and her husband are still the best of friends even though they had long since stopped sleeping with each other.
The movie also points to another stark, simple fact. Rodney Fraser (Nigel Hawthorne), an aged professor whose lover has an affair with George, could not have put it better when he says that the object of one's affection does not necessarily respond the way you want it to. (ylt)