About Adam
Directed and written by Gerard Stembridge
Starring: Stuart Townsend, Frances O’Connor, Charlotte Bradley, Kate Hudson
This is billed as a romantic comedy, and as it has love, sex and relationships and it’s funny I suppose it qualifies. However, it is fortunately not your run-of-the-mill Hollywood star-driven piece of fluff. It’s a joint UK/Irish production, set and filmed in Dublin, with a few well-known faces. It also provides a little more to think about and a few unanswered questions. So it still has stars and it’s still fairly fluffy, but it’s still fun.
Bouncy blonde Lucy (Hudson — Goldie Hawn’s daughter BTW) works in a café and goes through a boy a week. Just when she wishes someone new and different would walk into her life, he almost magically appears in the restaurant. His name is Adam. He works in an arty photographic studio. He has a gorgeously expensive modern apartment. He’s gentle and understanding and darkly handsome. And he drives a classic Jaguar. Lucy falls for him, invites him home, and he proceeds to charm the pants off the entire family. In most cases literally.
I haven’t seen All About Eve, but there has to be some connection in there somewhere, even if it’s just the marketing people wanting to capitalise on a well-known title. Is Adam meant to be the prototypical male? The character is left somewhat unclear. He appears to be the perfect man — for everyone. He can be bright and fun with Lucy, tragic and intellectual with uni-student second sister Laura (O’Connor), and sophisticatedly sexy with married oldest sister Alice (Bradley), who each get their turns with him. Their mother thinks he’s lovely. He even gets into bed with their (straight) brother David and can do the beer-and-football bloke thing with the best of them. But he’s going to marry Lucy. So is he a scheming, manipulative seducer, or is he really capable of almost innocently giving everyone what they want?
The film cleverly uses multiple viewpoints of the same scenes to build up a complete picture to the viewer of events from when Adam walked on the scene, through the proposal episode until the denouement. However, we’re never sure which is the “real” Adam, or if indeed there is a “real” Adam. A very different, nasty, dark film could have been made on the same outline, but as it is, this element remains more in the realm of fantasy, just slightly worrying and mysterious, and just slightly defying the “romantic comedy” label.
Sue
