Erotic Movies: Lolita

If you haven't seen it yet, we recommend the modern version of Kubrick’s Lolita, made by Adrian Lyne in 1997. Lolita then: fatal and naughty.

 

The new Lolita is without a doubt an excellent adaptation of the Kubrick classic from the sixties.

 

 

Jeremy Irons is Humbert Humbert, a quiet and refined professor, who gets the hots for Lolita, hot 14-year-old Dominique Swain, his Lo, a dream woman from his childhood, a real mirage with seductive feet and provocative braces. She is a sexually open-minded teenager who does not care about her age, her mother Charlotte Haze (played by Melanie Griffith) or morality. And Hum is obsessed. Really obsessed. All the time. He is so over the moon that he marries her mother, nibbles her chewing gum and dreams of the moment he will get her into bed.

 

 

And when the mother is killed in an accident, the dream begins. A steaming, pathological and wild odyssey, where Hum is having the time of his life. When he gets to embrace the girl and get into her pants. Direct, with all the taboos that go with it. The girl is loving it. In her own special way. Perversely, child-like and stupidly. Like an old lady who has a younger lover. Like a yuppie doing it with a prostitute. Like any babe catching an older man. Humbert is happy for the first time in his life. The first time in many years, after typhoid took his wife. His first Lolita when he was just fourteen. And here this version differs from the old one and from the famous novel by Vladimir Nabokov because we are explained the reasons for the professor’s obsession. It diminishes the paedophile accusations, it brings his psychological profile closer to the viewer and excuses him in all his actions.

 

 

The gentleman is not a dirty paedophile, but a poor man pathologically in love with a 14 year-old girl. Just a man with the hots for a femme fatale, a tiny creature with a plan, a desire to be important and to stand out from her peers. Adrian Lyne, author of Nine And a Half Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal directs slowly and with style. Just like Stanley Kubrick, except a bit more elegantly. Even deeper, more precise and at the same time naughtier. It is only a shame he did not choose an older actress because he could have shown more. More than just French kisses and sex in the dark.

 

Dominique Swain, who did not become a star because the movie was not distributed in the US, was only 15 at the time of shooting (she was chosen between 2500 girls, instead of Christina Ricci and when Natalie Portman turned the role down), which means that the hottest scenes had to be shot with a double and a sheet had to be put between her and Jeremy Irons (Dustin Hoffman was originally planned). But still, the movie came out at the wrong time, when there were many paedophile scandals and they ruined it and took its momentum away. It lost so much momentum that it had no regular distribution and was shown in only one movie theatre in the US. Naturally, the academy responsible for the Oscars got scared as well. 

 

 

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