"Ben Affleck is to good acting what a cooked pickle is to haute cuisine."
It is inevitable to remember the joke of the long-awaited critic and journalist Antonio Gasset after seeing the American actor with the face of who knows very well what in a mess of the caliber of Deep
Water
(
Deep Water
).
An erotic
thriller
starring Affleck and Ana de Armas and directed by the now octogenarian British director Adrian Lyne, father of some of the most toxic, ridiculous and blockbuster films of the eighties and nineties.
From
Fatal Attraction
to
An Indecent Proposal
or
Nine and a Half Weeks
, all with a tiresome formula of commercial sex performed by Hollywood stars to adorn plots of pseudo-erotic games of rich and boring characters that border on the embarrassment of others.
Two decades after
Unfaithful
, in which Lyne insisted on the moralizing vision of her adultery, the director returns to that tacky universe of impassive men possessed by alleged
femme fatales
dressed in fine lingerie.
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Based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith that was already adapted by the French Michel Deville in the eighties with Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant in the skin of a marriage as open as it is tortured,
Deep Waters
focuses on a type of couple that perhaps had a reason of being in the retrograde bourgeoisie of decades ago, but that today is directly implausible.
Ana de Armas with Jacob Elordi, in an image of 'Deep waters'.
Ana de Armas is a young wife and mother who doesn't like to be either.
To entertain herself, in addition to drinking even the water from the vases, she cheats on her husband with all the young men who cross her path.
The couple sleeps in separate beds and the husband, who neither works nor needs it after inventing a drone that made him a millionaire, doesn't seem to care about his wife's dalliances.
Both her daughter and her husband get on her nerves. Why are they still together?
That is just one of the long list of questions, inconsistencies and decisions that remain in the air and that, deep down, it is almost better not to know about.
Lyne intends to make an ode to jealousy as an aphrodisiac elixir and perhaps that makes some sense for an 81-year-old man who found his particular gold mine in a cinema that at this point is only fatuous, old and toxic.
Deep water
Direction:
Adrian Lyne.
Cast:
Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas, Kristen Connolly, Tracy Letts, Jacob Elordi.
Genre:
Thriller
.
United States, 2021.
Platform:
Amazon Prime Video.
Duration:
115 minutes.
Premiere: March 18.
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