Afterglow (1997)

“Marianne” (Lara Flynn Boyle) is sexily awaiting the return home from work of her executive husband “Jeffrey” (Jonny Lee Miller) but he just mutters something about a jockstrap and shows her little interest. Exasperated, she also needs an handyman to do some household plumbing and so alights on “Lucky” (Nick Nolte). Now he is married to “Phyllis” (Julie Christie) but isn’t averse to playing away from home now and again and so, well what now ensues rather surprised me. Not because it’s very good, but because Julie Christie took part in it. For a film that’s about relationships, possessiveness and sex it’s a shockingly sterile exercise with JLM as wooden as picket fence and Nolte just not at all convincing as the sex magnet his aptly named character would have us believe. “Phyllis” is an erstwhile actress and is a classy woman too, so what she’d ever have seen in her scruffy philandering husband didn’t leap of the screen at me in the first place. The same could be said of the plausibility of the other marriage that’s unsurprisingly struggling here. Perhaps the scenario is supposed to engender empathy from those of us in marriages that have entered cruise control and that have no longer any flare in them, but I just couldn’t find anything about any of these people that I wanted to like, so I couldn’t really have cared less. I did quite like the house with all the gadgets (maybe not the blue lights) but the rest of this, save for some acerbic dialogue from Christie, just didn’t really impress, sorry.