‘Lolita’ Makes the European Rounds

After a year full of brutal revelations about cases of pedophilia in Belgium, France and elsewhere, the world’s most controversial nymphet has landed in northern Europe. Still begging for U.S. distribution, Adrian Lyne’s “Lolita” opened last week in France, Belgium and Switzerland and earlier this month in Germany.

Foundering in the wake of the mighty “Titanic,” “Lolita” has had disappointing European box-office results. In Italy, however, where it opened last fall, its surprise success drove Vladimir Nabokov’s 43-year-old novel to the top of the bestseller list. The film is scheduled to open in May in Britain and midyear in Japan.

Although reviews in both France and Germany were less than kind, and some German cinemas were picketed, the film has hardly reaped the whirlwind of calumny some feared.

For good reason. The last thing this “Lolita” does is condone pedophilia.

“No one comes well out of it. They all die, for chrissake,” fumes the director, exasperated at the morass of misunderstanding surrounding the star-crossed film. “Humbert Humbert is a pedophile, and it’s hideous what he does to her. But Nabokov makes you feel sorry for the man and laugh with the man. Ultimately, it’s a love story. When he sees her at the end of the movie pregnant and, as he says, polluted by another man’s child and no longer a nymphet, he still loves her. There’s a certain redemption.”

Lyne and Pathe, the French film company that bankrolled the $60-million film, are desperately hoping that a strong showing in Europe will persuade wary studios to distribute the film in the U.S.

The director is still bewildered and somewhat embittered by the stupefying silence from his peers. Says Lyne: “I’ve got a pile of letters from presidents of studios saying they think it’s my best work, that they were overwhelmed by the film. But suddenly conversations stopped. No one wants to run the risk of being accused as the poor fool who supports pedophilia.”

Lyne’s “Lolita” is a sensitively rendered piece of work, shot through with the comedy, tragedy, anguish and longing of Nabokov’s novel. Like the book, the film is more concerned with the doomed search for lost innocence and the lineaments of obsessions than with incest and pedophilia.

Acutely self-aware, even as he descends into paranoia and murderous jealousy, not to mention careless grooming, Jeremy Irons’ Humbert is besotted and prudish, venal and noble at the same time. He’s completely smitten with and repulsed by the bubble-gum superficiality of postwar America, the world’s adolescent. As much as Dominique Swain’s Lolita is overmastered by this father-mother-lover, she’s certainly no slouch at manipulation, cruelty and deceit.

Compared to Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film, bled of all prurience by Hays Code restrictions that denied even the most innocent kiss between a predatory James Mason and a submissive Sue Lyon, Lyne’s version is erotic, but it’s hardly scandalous.

Although the director used body doubles for sex sequences, virtually all the explicit scenes were cut to conform with the United States’ Child Pornography Act of 1996. The legislation categorically rules out segments that purport to portray sex with minors--adult body double or no body double.

Despite these cuts, which Lyne insists hardly affect the final version, the latest film is a great deal truer to the original book than Kubrick’s footloose interpretation. It may not be a masterpiece, but it is a well-wrought translation of Nabokov’s masterpiece.

Lyne and Dmitri Nabokov, the Russian-born, Americanized novelist’s only child and literary executor, were in the French capital last week battling mightily against the notion that the book and film somehow give perversion a good name. The 62-year-old Nabokov acted as an unpaid consultant to the film and has no direct interest in it.

In France at least, the critics seemed less worried about morality than about the quixotic attempt to revisit hallowed cinematic terrain staked out by Kubrick. They are delighted to criticize a hypocritical America so constrained by political correctness that this new “Lolita” has sent distributors scurrying for cover.

If French critics were nearly unanimous in their praise for Irons as a marvelously anguished Humbert coming apart at the psychological seams and Swain as a maddeningly erratic, erotic Lolita, the idea of Lyne daring to scale Mt. Stanley took their breath away.

For all the misguided criticisms leveled against Lyne’s “9 1/2 Weeks,” “Fatal Attraction” and “Indecent Exposure,” with their earnestly heated sexual provocations, an excess of subtlety, the sort Nabokov’s novel requires, was never one of them.

Yet except for the bloody ending, which was lambasted for diving into Grand Guignol effects, Lyne’s “Lolita” achieves a subtlety the Kubrick film glaringly lacks. Although Vladimir Nabokov received script-writing credit for the earlier film, he ominously complained that he felt like a patient in an ambulance watching helplessly out the window as the film reeled by, far out of his reach and control.

“Kubrick did not see character in the same way as my father did,” the novelist’s son explains. “The best parts of the film are where James Mason reads my father’s words.

“Adrian, by contrast, has found a cinematic language that is the equivalent of father’s literary language.”

Some French reviewers went overboard to blast Lyne’s film for being too soft on America. “Adrian Lyne doesn’t seem to understand that ‘Lolita,’ according to Nabokov, functions like an extremely sophisticated and sardonic war machine against an America that is as Puritan as it is consumerist,” railed Didier Peron in the Parisian daily “Liberation.”

Counters Dmitri Nabokov, who accompanied his father on numerous cross-country trips through the U.S.: “Some people have attributed a hatred and disdain of America in the book. That’s not at all what he felt. He had a great tenderness for the country, particularly Southern California and the West.”

The Kubrick comparison weighs heavily on Lyne. “Kubrick takes refuge in irony because he really doesn’t come to grips with the story,” the director argues.

One critical difference is that the current film reinstates Humbert’s childhood romance with a 13-year-old girl who died of typhus, thus giving him a believable, poignant motivation missing in the earlier film. His obsession with Lolita is partially an attempt to recapture that dead love.

If the European critics praised this explanatory flashback, they were largely puzzled over the diminished role of Clare Quilty, Humbert’s diabolic doppelganger. Where Peter Sellers turned Quilty into a debonair, fast-talking comic, Frank Langella is “properly phantom-like,” says Dmitri Nabokov, that is until the end, when he stumbles, first hung over then mortally wounded, from hallway to piano to bed, where his last gasp is a bubble of blood.

This penultimate four-minute scene has been universally deplored, despite the fact that the book spins out a much lengthier tour de force of gore.

“If you read the book, he loses a quarter of his head and still won’t die. It is Grand Guignol,” says Lyne defensively. “Peter Sellers did the scene wearing a sheet as a toga, playing pingpong with Humbert. If this is any less insane than what I did, explain it to me.”