10 great films about infidelity

Infidelity in the movies rarely comes without consequences. An affair can turn the world on its axis for cinema’s cheaters and cheated alike – for the former, torturous guilt and fallout from being caught, and for the latter, the realisation that the life they share with another isn’t quite what they thought it was. It’s with that disruption that characters destabilise, with unfaithfulness in film bringing into even the most polite, unremarkable domestic set-ups paranoia, obsession and – not infrequently – violence, even murder, the one act of passion begetting another.

Sex and violence are cosy bedfellows in films about infidelity, and also in the work of Claude Chabrol, whose La Femme infidèle (1969) is rereleased this September in a new restoration. In Chabrol’s precision-tooled thriller, the seemingly ideal life of unassuming insurance broker Charles (Michel Bouquet) – glamorous wife, prize pupil son, elegant country home – is upended when he comes to suspect that wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran) is seeing another man. As he turns amateur detective on Hélène and her suspected lover, Charles lets his curiosity lead him away from his cosy bourgeois existence and down a considerably darker road.

As the French New Wave’s answer to Hitchcock, Chabrol naturally draws shock and suspense from his story of adultery. As a topic of such universality, though, infidelity has, since cinema’s beginning, been covered the world over and every which way. To celebrate La Femme infidèle returning to UK screens, here are 10 more formidable films about infidelity, from silent Hollywood weepie to deadpan Soviet comedy.

Director: F.W. Murnau

German expressionism comes to Hollywood in Sunrise, F.W. Murnau’s early 20th-century fairytale mixing gothic set design, state-of-the-art film technique and a moral: beware lustful temptation and the bright lights of the big city. Seduced by vampish ‘Woman from the City’ Margaret Livingston, farmer George O’Brien plots to murder wife Janet Gaynor and leave his rural home behind, but instead sends Gaynor’s wife fleeing into the city when he can’t bring himself to carry out his plan.

Amid the buzz of the metropolis, as man and wife reunite and rediscover their love for one another, Murnau brings all the tricks of a young medium: elaborate tracking shots and back projection; rapid editing and multiple exposure to convey the mania of modernity (and to torment the man with thoughts of his mistress); shadowy, exaggerated sets to express the characters’ inner emotions. Made at the twilight of the silent era, Sunrise represents the zenith of cinema before sound, with the best of cinematography, montage and design harmonised for maximum emotional impact.

Director: Kenneth Macpherson

If Sunrise represents the best of Hollywood in the late silent era, Borderline is a glimpse at a different cinematic universe in that period. Kenneth Macpherson’s film follows a Black couple, Pete (Paul Robeson) and Adah (Eslanda Robeson), whose relationship is riven by Adah’s affair with the white Thorne (Gavin Arthur), during her stay at a small-town inn. Discovery of the tryst leads in turn to a confrontation between Thorne and his wife, Astrid (Hilda Dolittle), and to a sudden eruption of racism from bigoted locals in town.

Shot in a village neighbouring the Swiss Alps by British-American avant garde collective the Pool Group, Borderline confronts subjects which were taboo – and soon to be outlawed – in Hollywood; from 1934, the Production Code would forbid the depiction of interracial relationships in American movies. Borderline also uses abstracting montage to access the psychological terrain of its protagonists, Macpherson conveying all the rage, ecstasy and heartbreak of his characters through electrifying visual patterns more reminiscent of early Soviet cinema than that of the West.

Director: Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti brings some of the neorealist flavour of his early period to his adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain’s story of a drifter who finds work at a roadside diner only to enter into a fateful affair with the proprietor’s wife. In Visconti’s film, it’s not California but a dusty stretch of Italy’s Po Valley where Cain’s antihero – here named Gino, and played by Massimo Girotti – stops off for a steamy rendezvous with Giovanna (Clara Calamai), with whom he soon begins plotting the demise of Giovanna’s husband.

The plot beats remain much the same as in the novel, but the ragged, dirty detail of Ossessione is in the execution by Visconti, who with supreme confidence makes not just a mighty directorial debut but one of the first works of Italian neorealism. Using worn real locations and convincingly grimy sets, and giving focus to the banal quotidian of life on the poverty line in Mussolini’s Italy, Visconti only makes Cain’s tale of lust curdling into murder seem more squalid.

Director: David Lean

“It’s awfully easy to lie when you know that you’re trusted implicitly.” The tragedy of David Lean’s Brief Encounter isn’t just in how the great romance – one of the greatest romances in the cinema, at that – between Laura (Celia Johnson) and Alec (Trevor Howard) is forbidden; it’s also in how their love would seem fated, their connection undeniable, even though Laura already has a tender, loving relationship and ideal (if routine) family life with her husband.

Adapting Noël Coward’s play for the screen, Lean complicates the movie fantasy of love: there’s no apparent great discontentment in Laura’s life or marriage to give reason to her being drawn to Alec. The pair simply seem to be magnetised after they meet by chance one day in a train station tea room. As Laura and Alec grow increasingly intimate, and their spouses remain none the wiser, Brief Encounter finds tension less in whether the lovers will be caught than in whether they might shatter from the guilt.

Director: Mikio Naruse

A Japan in a state of ruin and recovery following the devastation of World War II is the fitting setting for the knottily human drama of Floating Clouds. Where flashbacks to the beginning of Yukiko (Hideko Takamine) and the married Kengo’s (Masayuki Mori) affair in Japanese-occupied Indochina show a blissful Imperial-era romance, in the gloom and uncertainty of post-war Tokyo, Yukiko and Kengo are directionless, capricious, unsure of what they want out of the world or each other.

In the years after 1945, Kengo has a series of affairs – with Yukiko and others – as his wife grows ill, while Yukiko finds fleeting security as a mistress to men of varying decency and power. It’s a picture of a society unsure of itself or its future in the chaos after war, but one where men can continue to play, while it’s women who remain most at risk of being discarded and of falling into desperation.

Director: Georgiy Daneliya

Autumn Marathon is, as the film’s opening credits have it, a “sad comedy”. In late-Brezhnev-era Leningrad, lecturer Andrey (Oleg Basilashvili) is unable to decide between staying with his wife or leaving her for his younger mistress. And so, he simply carries on both relationships, telling ever more outlandish lies to cover his tracks, even though everyone around him already seems to know about the affair.

It’s tempting to read this, along with director Georgiy Daneliya’s choice of colour scheme – everything in dreary shades of grey – as satirical of the state of things in the USSR at the time of Autumn Marathon’s making, the Union carrying on a fiction in the face of a misery so blatant it becomes absurd. Allegory or no, the film is most definitely sublime farce, taking dryly comic satisfaction in the misfortune of its increasingly glum protagonist, who in the tradition of great farce despairs at a worsening situation for which he is himself largely responsible.

Director: Stanley Kubrick

That what infidelity there is in Eyes Wide Shut largely happens in the dreams and fantasies of its couple, Dr Bill (Tom Cruise) and Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman), is no less destabilising for the pair’s marriage. After Alice confesses that she once fantasised about running away with a handsome stranger, Bill’s ego is sufficiently bruised that the good doctor embarks on a sexually charged midnight odyssey through Yuletide New York, taking in adulterous patients, doomed sex workers and masked orgies attended by sinister elites.

At the tail-end of a boom period for the genre, the erotic thriller is – in classic Stanley Kubrick fashion – given epic, blackly comic form with Eyes Wide Shut, which takes the straying male professional of the typical Hollywood erotic thriller and situates him in a cold, troubling, mysterious universe. It’s an elevated erotic thriller, if you will, with Kubrick tackling male-female relationships and desire with the same deep contemplation as he did war and the cosmos.

Director: Wong Kar Wai

In 1960s Hong Kong, Mr Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Mrs Chan (Maggie Cheung) move with their respective spouses into neighbouring apartments. When it becomes clear that his wife and her husband are having an affair during frequent ‘business trips’ away, Mr Chow and Mrs Chan are drawn together into a kind of fling of their own, a charged semi-romance of silent dinners, furtive glances and non-sexual marital roleplaying.

Painted in vivid colour by Christopher Doyle and Ping Bin Lee’s luxurious photography, this is cinema’s most gorgeous affair – though whether what Mr Chow and Mrs Chan have together constitutes an affair is for interpretation. Determined to never become like their cheating other halves, Mr Chow and Mrs Chan resist making their arrangement physical, their function for one another in this lonely city rather seeming to be – initially, at least – to provide each other with a companionship that they don’t get from their absent spouses.

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

It’s the stuff of teenage fantasy: their girlfriends gone away for the summer, two unquenchably horny young Mexico City men just out of high school, Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael García Bernal), are joined on a road trip to a secluded beach by beautiful, sexually uninhibited older woman Luisa (Maribel Verdú). The trip, though, will be weighted with melancholy, and not only because of devastating developments for Luisa – including her discovery of her husband’s infidelity – which inspire her to throw caution to the wind and embark on a cross-country dalliance.

In the moment of sunny abandon, a god-like narrator – a characteristic touch of the divine from director Alfonso Cuarón – portents tragic futures, for the film’s central trio and the people they meet on their journey to the possibly fantastical ‘Heaven’s Mouth’. Things will soon change drastically, both for Mexico – here, an election that will see a change in government for the first time in 71 years; there, the building of a luxury hotel that will put a fourth-generation fishing family out of work – and also for Tenoch, Julio and Luisa, their lives all soon to be forever altered by time and fate.

Director: Todd Haynes

For the principle characters to have fulfilling romantic lives in Carol, Todd Haynes’ ravishing queer melodrama set in 1950s America, infidelity would seem almost a necessity. While housewife Carol (Cate Blanchett) is in the process of trying to divorce a husband (Kyle Chandler) whom she doesn’t love and who won’t let her go easily, shop assistant Therese (Rooney Mara) is dating a man for reasons she doesn’t seem to know, beyond the fact that the same-sex attraction she feels is considered aberrant in a society that’s built for her to become a man’s other half.

After they meet over a department store counter, Carol and Therese begin a tentative flirtation – all heavy silences and knowing looks – which threatens to bloom into romance when they take a road trip out of the city. It’s hopping between quiet motels along a road towards the Midwest that the pair at last have, away from the crowds and gossip of home, a chance to enjoy the kind of relationship each of them really wanted all along.

La Femme infidèle is back in cinemas from 11 September. Claude Chabrol: Elements of Crime is at BFI Southbank in September and early October.