Lolita

A Phoenix pick

After languishing in distribution limbo, Adrian Lyne's sumptuous adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel finally seduces theaters. Disarmingly moving and not a bit tawdry, this ode to obsession at once distinguishes itself from Stanley Kubrick's eccentric 1962 rendering. Indeed, the film's sickest truth is its strongest lure: Jeremy Irons as dapper pedophile Humbert Humbert and newcomer Dominique Swain as his 12-year-old fixation make a disturbingly good couple. Once again, Irons is the epitome of swallowed lust, a genteel soul snatcher who aches at the sight of his life's love, who's played by Swain with bratty insolence and fidgety eroticism. Possession, of course, is no simple affair: Humbert's blackly comic efforts to consume the girl are complicated by her hothouse orchid of a mother (Melanie Griffith) and the lecher's own malignant shadow, playwright Clare Quilty (Frank Langella in a hulking tour de force).

Director Lyne (Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal) and screenwriter Stephen Schiff triumph in invoking Nabokov's succulent prose. Like Humbert, however, neither can resist the temptation to indulge: Lyne's glossy style borders on the turgid, and the script's portrayal of Lolita as a devourer of oh-so-sensual food -- bananas, cherries, creamy dairy products -- is an unintentional howl. Nonetheless, this Lolita is a provocative surprise, an artful interpretation of Nabokov's tragic pairing of precociousness and perversion. Screens at the Copley Place Friday, September 11 at 7 and 9:30 p.m. and Saturday, September 12 at 10:30 a.m. and 1 and 4:45 p.m. Screenwriter Stephen Schiff will appear to introduce Friday's 7 p.m. showing.

-- Alicia Potter

---

Film Festival Feature Films

| With Friends like These | Digging to China | Monument Ave. | Rounders | Lolita | God Said, 'Ha!' | My Son the Fanatic | The Mighty | Shattered Image | Gods and Monsters | Xui Xui: The Sent-Down Girl | Without Limits | Clubland | The Inheritors | The Celebration | Urban Ghost Story | The Boys | Living Out Loud | Stuart Bliss | The General | The Kindness of Strangers | Dancing at Lughnasa | Central Station | The Human Race | Double You Street | Oberwasser -- By U-boat to America | The Witman Boys | The Cruise | Confession of a Sexist Pig | Melting Pot |

---

More Boston Film Festival information, film descriptions, and show times

---