by Dmetri Kakmi

Since its release, Adrian Lyne's screen adaptation of Nabokov's novel "Lolita" has been under fire by anti-paedophile groups lobbying for it to be banned. At the same time, "Happiness", a film by Todd Solondz, which also deals with paedophilia has been largely overlooked by the prohibitionists. Dmetri Kakmi takes a close look at how both films and Nabokov's controversial novel deal with this theme.

For over forty years, the name "Lolita" has been synonymous with dissolute degeneracy. The very word conjures up visions of a Sodom and Gomorrah, The Whore of Babylon -- everything that is dark under the moon. People just have to hear that enthralling three syllable moniker, Lo-lee-ta, and it brings on a reflex reaction. For some it ignites a fire in their breeches, for others it signals the collapse of family values and the rise of Beelzebub.

Forget Adrian Lyne's "Lolita" (1997) -- Todd Solondz's "Happiness" (1998) is much closer to Nabokov's darkly satiric intentions when he wrote his now celebrated novel in 1955. Solondz's examination of the arid middle-classes, and the combined joys and torments of paedophilic desire is far more daring and confrontational than anything in Lyne's ravishing but subdued adaptation. It's a remarkable coincidence, however, that two films offering largely different perspectives of this controversial topic are released concurrently.

As a long-time fan of "9-1/2 Weeks" (1985), I found Lyne's "Lolita" achingly, ravishingly beautiful. There's a shimmering joy, a pure surge of life and sensuous delight that springs right off the screen the minute we see Dominique Swain lolling beneath a sprinkler in her mother's backyard, her thin dress plastered to her shapely succulent flesh -- a nymphet with braces. We immediately see what it is that mesmerises and captives Jeremy Irons' doe-eyed dupe of a Humbert Humbert. As if his beaming face doesn't say it all, we also have Nabokov's immortal words: 'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. We're ten minutes into the film, and we know we're in good hands. But already we can see that this is not going to be Nabokov's "Lolita".

In the novel, Nabokov was more interested in exploring his fascination with American pop culture that was then sweeping like wild fire from one end of the continent to the other. Aiming to traverse the American hinterlands, he wrote a punning, wickedly funny and linguistically complex and sophisticated road novel that, along the way, also celebrates the allure of nymphets, while providing a remarkably accurate insight into the paedophilic mind. Spice is added to this concoction by Humbert's rival for the affections of Lolita, the mysterious pornographer, Quilty, who follows the couple across the country.

The script sticks close to the events of the novel, but it changes the emphasis from satire to tragedy. In the novel, capricious Lolita is twelve; Lyne's nymph is fourteen. Nabokov's Humbert Humbert dismisses a Freudian reading of his obsession with young girls as shallow and ludicrous, yet by opening with Humbert's tragic love at the age of fourteen (shot in resplendent soft focus), the film sets up a man who is frozen in a distant time and place. The film's unstated implication is that physically Humbert may be in his mid forties, but psychologically he is still the fourteen-year-old boy constantly recreating the circumstances of his first love. It could be said that many paedophilic desires, but certainly not all, arise from this central dilemma. In this manner the audience can sympathise with a psychologically damaged, but gentle and remorseful man who traverses social taboos. But whether they would have sympathised with Nabokov's sly and devious Humbert is another matter.

For me, some of the funniest moments in the novel arise out of Humbert's habit of drugging his wife (Melanie Griffith) and step-daughter with strong sleeping powders in order to avoid perform his conjugal duties on the former, and to take advantage of the inert form of the latter. At one point he even contemplates drowning his crass wife (a brilliantly vulgar performance by Shelley Winters in the 1961 Kubrick version, wasted here by Griffith) in order to have her nubile daughter at his mercy, but fate fortunately intervenes. Best of all were his sleepless nights worrying just how to get rid of Lolita when, at fourteen, she would become too old for him. Eventually, he decides to marry her and father her children on whom he would commit incest. Dark, ambiguous territory the film disappointingly steers well away from, favouring instead a redemptive journey through a burning red hellfire.

It's left up to "Happiness" to deal with the more troubling issues in a manner that would have impressed Nabokov. In many ways, "Happiness" is the kind of film that could only have come out of someone who looks like Todd Solondz. In his publicity photos, he is the archetypal geek, a skinny dork with glasses thick as Coke bottles. No doubt he grew up friendless and dateless, forever on the edge. His success as a filmmaker is a kind of revenge of the geeks: what you lack in looks, you make up with talent.

His constantly whining and vapid New Jersey middle-class family of no-hopers was not to my taste, and I ran out of patience with them once too often, but I was impressed by how Solondz brings the freaks, the outsiders, the sickos into fleeting contact with the seemingly normal individuals and situations he examines. His talent is in making the normal look aberrant, while humanising and bringing a comic edge to the outlandish. Nothing in the film is as disconcerting as Marla Maples' plastic real estate agent, who comes across like a mannequin gifted with platitudes.

If Lara Flynn Boyle's pinched, frozen face is representative of android-like yuppies, Seymour Hoffmann's wheezing, masturbating corpulence is every parent's nightmare pervert from the sewers. His dirty phone calls to solitary women, jerk-offs and cascading cum shots (yes, folks, you see it all!) is a hilarious, repulsive eye-popper straight out of John Kennedy Toole's novel, "A Confederacy Of Dunces". Yet his scenes with the obese woman across the hallway -- who claims to have chopped up the doorman and keeps his genitals in her fridge -- is a coming together of two socially maladjusted individuals that is one of the more poignant and truth-filled moments in the film.

It's this level of compassion and unflinching truthfulness that is brought to bear on the paedophilic husband played by Dylan Baker. On the surface, this suburban family has it all: two little boys, a dog, a lovely house on a leafy street, a chirpy wife who finds joy in the simplest of household chores. What is about to crack open her complacency, however, is the revelation that her husband is also drugging and raping his eleven-year-old son's friends.

In what must have been a very difficult role, Baker is filled with remorse, pain and covert lust. Whether he is masturbating to a teenage boys' magazine in a parking lot, or eyeing off his two sleeping sons, he remains a chilling and pathetic portrayal of a man condemned to an impulse he can't even begin to comprehend. The scene where he prepares a tuna sandwich sprinkled with sleeping powder for a boy, and then waits for him to eat it is as fascinating as watching a python swallowing a live kitten. He is fearful, yet we never loose our sympathy for him. As Solondz said in an interview, 'It's just that there is nothing didactic about it. I'm interested not so much in judging but in understanding and figuring out these things.'

Towards the end of "Happiness", there's a remarkable scene between bereft father and son, which is a compliment to the power of Solondz's subtly insinuating dialogue: 'What did you do?' the son asks matter-of-factly. 'I made love to them.' 'What do you mean?' asks the perplexed son. 'I fucked them', his father responds. 'How did it feel?' 'Great.' 'Would you do it to me?' 'No, I'd jerk off', says the father staring into the middle distance.

It's this level of truth-saying and predatory calculatedness that distinguished Nabokov's murderer with a fancy prose style, but is distinctly lacking in Lyne's rendition of the character. It's left entirely to Quilty (Frank Langella), Humbert's dark shadow and id, to carry the load. What Irons amply gives us, however, is desire and torment with angelic wings.

The florid aesthetic of Lyne's "Lolita" acts as a backdrop for a tragic and genuinely rhapsodic film about the joys and pains of the flesh. Solondz's "Happiness", on the other hand, is a compelling and unsettling satire for the American age of Valium popping. In this manner, it could be said that the current film of "Lolita" stands in for the charming, old-world European sophisticate Humbert Humbert, while "Happiness", with its dangerous darker edge, is Quilty.

"Lolita" and "Happiness" are out now on general distribution.