STEAM CLEANING

Hearing Adrian Lyne talk about Diane Lane, the co-star of “Unfaithful,” his new film about a happily married woman’s affair with a younger man, you begin to understand why almost any actress in America would happily do anything--including strip naked--to be in one of this director’s movies.

“Diane breathes a kind of eroticism you just don’t see very often in Hollywood,” Lyne explained over lunch at his Benedict Canyon home, his voice husky and low, as if he were in the confessional. “Sexy women in Hollywood tend to be tough or hard. But Diane is vulnerable and totally natural. I was desperate to take all her makeup off because she looked so naturally beautiful--she just has this wonderful smeared, ragged kind of radiance.”

When Lyne was filming the scene in which Lane first meets her lover, played by Olivier Martinez, he’d whisper in her ear before each take, “Vulnerable. You’re vulnerable,” he says. “When you’re making a movie, you get this astonishing intimacy with actors--it’s a lot like having an affair.”

When it comes to sex, Lyne is the expert. For the past two decades, the 61-year-old British-born director has made a series of titillating morality tales that often ended up being debated on the op-ed pages--the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd weighed in Sunday with her take on the movie’s portrayal of scorned men and straying wives. His films have provoked critical derision and sent feminists into high dudgeon.

Lyne’s movies have a common theme; they chronicle people whose lust sends their lives careening out of control. He is Hollywood’s poet laureate of headlong erotic abandon. What makes Lyne so unusual is that he has continued to probe these affairs of the heart in an era when sex has virtually disappeared from Hollywood movies.

His first big hit, “Flashdance,” was a female-empowerment fantasy, starring Jennifer Beals as a welder by day, bar dancer by night. The movie got awful reviews, but its sleek visuals inspired hundreds of copycat MTV videos. Next came “91/2 Weeks,” the saga of a sexually obsessive relationship between Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. That was followed by “Fatal Attraction,” which starred Michael Douglas as a happily married man who has a fling with a sexpot who turns out to be a psycho.

Not long afterward came “Indecent Proposal,” with Robert Redford as a high-roller who offers a young married couple a million bucks if he can sleep with the wife (Demi Moore) for one night. Most recently, Lyne directed a remake of “Lolita,” the Vladimir Nabokov novel about a middle-aged man’s self-immolating obsession with a 12-year-old nymphet.

Typically for a Lyne film, “Unfaithful” has inspired mixed reactions. While critics have raved about Lane’s performance, opinion has been split about the movie itself. The film had a good opening weekend ($14.1 million) but in tracking polls men showed little interest in seeing a movie in which a beautiful wife cheats on a husband who’s a doting provider.

Lyne says that when he showed the film to test audiences, some men were so enraged by Lane’s betrayal of her husband, played by Richard Gere, that he stopped reading their reaction cards. Focus groups would erupt in heated arguments. “One of the men would say, ‘I can’t understand how this woman could have an affair when her marriage was so good. It’s such a slutty thing to do.’ And women would go crazy. They’d literally pounce on the guy, saying, ‘That’s the point, you idiot! You do irrational things when sex is involved.’”

Films from around the globe still deal frankly with carnal relations, whether it’s Alfonso Cuaron’s current “Y Tu Mama Tambien” or recent French films like “Romance” and “Baise-Moi.” But in America, where “Sex and the City” is a huge cable-TV hit, R. Kelly concerts have more raunchy crotch-grabbing than any strip-club show, and Internet pornography is almost as big a business as the defense industry, mainstream movies have been curiously chaste. As critic Michael Atkinson puts it, in today’s Hollywood “the sex scene is cinema non grata.”

In the early 1970s, sex was a hot dramatic topic in such movies as “Shampoo,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “Don’t Look Now” and “Last Tango in Paris.” Today sex is on the backburner, relegated to a subject for teen snickering or to indie films like “Mulholland Drive” and “Monster’s Ball.”

What’s changed? Just about everything. Movies in the 1970s were still an adult medium, in which filmmakers grappled with serious dramatic issues like the sexual revolution that were part of the cultural zeitgeist. Today’s movies are allergic to reality: They’re mostly superhero fantasies, like “The Scorpion King” and “Spider-Man,” or gimmicky romantic comedies, like “Kate and Leopold” or “40 Days and 40 Nights.”

Rob Cohen, director of last year’s hit “The Fast and the Furious,” says a movie like 1987’s “The Witches of Eastwick” could never be made today. “You’d never get three major movie actresses willing to squirm around in bed with the Devil, even if it was Jack Nicholson,” he says. “You have a whole new generation of movie stars who are very prudish today.”

Lyne’s “Lolita” was turned down by every studio in town before eventually airing on Showtime. “I can’t imagine that we would’ve had trouble releasing it in the 1970s or 1980s,” he says. “But after the JonBenet [Ramsey] case, there was this international obsession with pedophilia. Wherever I took the film, the corporate executives were petrified of being involved with condoning pedophilia.”

Lyne says he spent six weeks in an editing room on “Lolita” with an attorney at his side, telling him what to keep in and what to take out. “There was an atmosphere of real paranoia. At one point we were frightened to send the film across interstate lines to New York.”

When Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft has two statues of partially nude figures at Justice Department headquarters covered with blue drapes for his TV appearances, it would not be a stretch to say that we’re in a period of profound sexual repression.

But the New Economics play just as big a role as the New Puritanism. With most movies aimed at teens, studios want films with a PG-13 rating. “There can be a 40-million or 50-million-dollar difference between a PG-13 and an R movie,” says Cohen, whose film “XXX” is due in August. “You need to keep your movie sexy without it being sexual. We have a scene in ‘XXX’ where a guy nuzzles a girl’s breast, but you can’t show a nipple or any nudity without tipping it into ‘R’ territory.

“So in a lot of movies you end up with more sexual tension than sex, which must be why we’re all walking around with tension headaches.”

Today’s young moviegoers also seem to have a different attitude about sex. In the 1970s, cinema sex was groundbreaking. Today, with sexual imagery in practically every corner of the culture, sex isn’t such a hot topic. “Sex is so in your face, from advertising to music videos to kids’ clothing, that you have to wonder, what is there left for an artist to explore?” says DreamWorks production chief Michael De Luca.

“If great young filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, Alexander Payne, Wes Anderson and Darren Aronofsky wanted to pursue the subject, they could get movies made about it. But either they don’t feel it’s especially relevant to their lives or they think it’s already been explored.”

The filmmakers who still have a passion for sexual pyrotechnics--Lyne, Philip Kaufman (“Henry & June”) and Paul Verhoeven (“Basic Instinct”)--are all men in their 60s who came of age at a time when sex was still a taboo subject, a juicy forbidden fruit for an audacious artist. That’s not to say that sex isn’t firmly on the mind of every teenager in America. But as a dramatic topic, as De Luca puts it, “it’s the property of an older generation of filmmakers and moviegoers. And unfortunately, the last demographic that studios chase after is middle-aged moviegoers.”

Call me middle-aged (ouch!), but I think young moviegoers are missing out. Drama is all about exploring our dark side, and what’s best about “Unfaithful” is the way it unveils the turbulent emotions that lurk under our skins, even in the coziest relationships.

When Gere first begins to suspect something could be amiss, he asks Lane, “Do you love me?” She soothingly responds, “What a silly question.” And then she walks out of the room and turns off the light, leaving her husband in the dark, having already forgotten he was there.

“It’s the little moments that give away what people are feeling,” says Lyne. “I hope moviegoers will recognize things like that as something they’ve done or could’ve done themselves.”

I ask him where the idea for the scene came from. “Oh, my wife did it to me once,” he says dryly. “Though I hope she did it for different reasons.”

“The Big Picture” runs Tuesdays in Calendar. If you have questions, story ideas or criticism, e-mail [email protected].