Bel Ami

Indian Express Rating: **

Given where where Robert Pattinson is at professionally and personally,“love them and leave them” may just be what the doctor ordered. Only it is Pattinson we are talking about here,the guy with the scowls,smirks,flaring nostrils and half-shuttered eyes who never leaves the vague twilight ways of Stephenie Mayer for the vaguer,greyer world of Guy de Maupassant.

And that’s despite the women he beds —1890 French high-society wives played by Thurman (as Madeleine Forestier),Thomas (as Virginie Rousset) and Ricci (as Clotilde de Marelle). With the censor merrily snipping the much-talked-about steamy sex of Bel Ami,Pattinson’s charms as a pretty,penniless soldier taken in by these women are doubtful at best and dubious at worst. And since he consistently falls behind on the task of invoking the frustration and pain of a poor,talentless man such as him wanting to be an intrinsic part of Paris’s charmed circle,Bel Ami fails to rise. Worse,it feels inept in its inconsistent attempts to frame the whole story within the politics of that time,of France’s growing invasions into Africa and the opposition within.

It’s Madeleine’s husband Charles who takes in Georges Duroy (Pattinson) first. Charles knows him from the war and offers him a job at the paper he works in. Madeleine thinks of a column Georges could write evoking the loneliness of a soldier fighting in distant lands and even ghost-writes for him. It is in the Forestier home that Georges meets Virginie and Clotilde. As Georges makes no bones about where he would like his relationship with Madeleine to proceed,she gently pushes him in the direction of the young Clotilde.

Georges is soon having an affair with the latter,who sets up a love nest for him and is infatuated with him. But it is influence and respectability that Georges seeks and so he moves to be by Madeleine’s side when her husband is dying and marries her. That she is his voice in the paper is known to all,making Georges a subject of derision. So he goes next for Virginie,the wife of the paper’s owner.

If Clotilde is Georges’s equal,Madeleine is superior in ways he doesn’t like. The oldest Virginie,on the other hand,he heartlessly uses.

When required to be expressively passionate in his love or hate,Pattinson pulls it off. But a large part of Maupassant’s novel is about the social,gender and national politics of that time and the nuances therein. Just consider what the women call him —”bel ami” or “beautiful friend”,the French way of saying a lover with a lot unsaid. Pattinson can be the lover. Some would even call him beautiful. But he wouldn’t pass the test of that quaint expression.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com