Oh, Forget It

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Handsome couple, swell clothes, upper-crust settings, smart, sexually sparring dialogue and a plot device that contrives to keep the pair apart until you think you -- and they -- are about to burst. It worked in 1939. It worked in 1957, when it was retitled An Affair to Remember. It even worked last year when it was extensively quoted in Sleepless in Seattle. How is it, then, that Love Affair doesn't work in 1994?

Probably because it's been postmodernized. Previously Terry (Annette Bening in the new version) was a virgin, perkily defending that status while the threat to her innocence, Mike the Playboy (Warren Beatty), was shadowed by Catholic guilt about his careless ways. (Remember those poignant visits to his wise old auntie's chapel?) These scruples served two functions: they heated up forbidden desires, and they gave a certain bent logic to the three-month hiatus the couple imposed on their affair, ostensibly to shed other commitments, really for the chaste contemplation of this one's radical implications.

You can see why Beatty (who produced the film and co-wrote it with Robert Towne) was drawn to this story; for a famous womanizer, it must have emotionally autobiographical elements. But he also recognized that maidenly virtue and religiously inspired guilt are tough sells these days. Under Glenn Gordon Caron's uninflected direction, there are no chapels (though a distressingly feeble Katharine Hepburn appears as the aunt), the couple consummates quickly, and the 90-day wait for their famous date atop the Empire State Building is motivated by no more than a postcoital fear of rushing into something. Not much suspense in that. Some of us religious and romantic skeptics have always thought this was a loathsomely pious and sentimental tale, but in a way we were wrong. Shorn of those qualities, it just dries up and blows away.