Running on empty | 10 March 2012

Bel Ami is based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1895 novel of the same name about a young man who sleeps himself to the top of Parisian society — I once slept myself to the top of Parisian society, but by the time I got there I was far too exhausted to properly enjoy it — and while it is lush and handsomely mounted and features copious sex scenes it lacks what it would absolutely have to have were it to work: erotic sizzle.

It should, in its energies and passions, be most like Dangerous Liaisons, say, but it’s neither seductive nor absorbing, and although I hate to point the finger — once you have slept your way to the top in Paris, even pointing a finger can seem like too much — I would say the lead actor, Robert Pattinson, means well and tries hard, bless, but just doesn’t have the chops.

Yes, he is a teen heart-throb, and he is handsome, in a square-jawed way, and you will get to see his buttocks, which do look firm yet juicy, but he can’t do lust (not a spark) and he can’t give his character any kind of depth. It’s as if an Inbetweener has somehow been cast adrift in the Belle Époque and, miraculously, finds it a clunge heaven, with women falling at his feet. ‘Why do you always come back to me?’ he asks one of his conquests. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, and neither do I, and neither will you. Or, as I’d have said to her directly, if I had the chance, ‘It sure beats the hell out of me too, love. Now, move along. There is nothing to see here.’