Lolita

But Lolita the film and Lolita the book are apparently about two different topics, and here I'm going to draw from The Australian's Evan Williams for enlightenment because I haven't read Vladimir Nabokov's novel.

According to Williams Lolita the novel was "an amused and pitiless exploration of the springs of American popular culture. The hopelessness of Humbert's sexual passion stood, in a sense, for the hopelessness of any engagement between Nabokov's ideal world - that of European culture and refinement - and the world of Dolores Haze" (the young Lolita).

Lolita was "a complex satire on American consumerism."

In other words the novel wasn't a salacious skin flick about incest. Neither is this film really. It's stuck somewhere in the middle, between an ironic black comedy and a failed love affair, and that's a difficult world for a film to inhabit.

So Adrian Lyne's version of Lolita (Stanley Kubrick made another in 1962) seems confused, perhaps especially so if you haven't read the book.

The plot tells of an academic called Humbert (Jeremy Irons) who in at least his forties falls hopelessly in love with a fourteen year old girl who he calls Lolita.

He marries her mother (Melanie Griffith) who is soon dispatched from the film leaving Humbert and his daughter to each other as they travel around America in a cute wooden panelled car in 1947.

There is a climax but it's puzzlingly surreal and out of step with most of the rest of the movie. Somehow Lolita doesn't quite make sense.

Lolita however is beautifully filmed. It's full of outstandingly presented interiors and exteriors shot through the soft filters we'd expect for a wistful romantic drama.

It is also superbly cast. Melanie Griffith as the mother was perfect as Lolita's sloppy and inattentive mother. Any child of hers would have tended to have been spoilt and disrespectful.

Jeremy Irons was right in his element. His Humbert is frightfully worried. He should be. He's hopelessly in love with his daughter.

Young Dominique Swain plays Lolita with avid gum popping enthusiasm. And I'd imagine that Nobokov might well have portrayed her that way in his novel. She would have fitted beautifully into a black comedy.

But because Lolita isn't ironic and because it concentrates almost entirely on Humbert's predicament, even leaving the young girl's motivations out of the picture, it only becomes a strange tale of thwarted love.

And then you would have to argue that we really needed to have more than the limited glimpses of what the girl might be thinking. After all there are very good reasons for the taboo on adults allowing themselves to become sexually involved with children!

But if, as Evan Williams and many aspects of the film suggests, Lolita is meant to be wild satire on consumerism (I was strongly reminded of The Coen Brother's Barton Fink at one stage) then it could have been a triumph.

And if it was only about falling in love with the wrong person then at least we should have been introduced to the child's pain as well as Humbert's. And then it's middle reel mightn't have dragged as it did.

But still Lolita does offer plenty for discussion.