SPAIN: THE CONTROVERSIAL REMAKE OF "LOLITA", STARRING JEREMY IRONS, HAS ITS OFFICIAL WORLD PREMIERE AT SAN SEBASTIAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Record ID: 387186

  • Title: SPAIN: THE CONTROVERSIAL REMAKE OF "LOLITA", STARRING JEREMY IRONS, HAS ITS OFFICIAL WORLD PREMIERE AT SAN SEBASTIAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
  • Date: 20th September 1997
  • Summary: EXTERIOR OF FESTIVAL VENUE
  • Embargoed: 5th October 1997 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: SAN SEBASTIAN, SPAIN
  • Country: Spain
  • Reuters ID: LVADUMI13PE4CXSSPSZJKAAQ0SSP
  • Story Text: The long-awaited nineties version of the film "Lolita", directed by Adrian Lyne had its world premiere at Spain's San Sebastian film festival on Saturday (September 20).

    British Director Lyne is best known for his films "Flashdance" and "Fatal Attraction".

    The controversial film "Lolita", which stars Jeremy Irons, has yet to be released in the United States because distributors are nervous about the subject matter.

    Fifteen year-old Dominique Swain plays Lolita, a twelve year-old girl who has a sexual relationship with Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons).

    The San Sebastian audience seemed to have no qualms about the film's content and its premiere was greeted by sustained applause.

    Lyne's "Lolita" is the second screen version of Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel. Stanley Kubrick directed the original film which starred James Mason as Humbert Humbert and Peter Sellers was cast as Humbert's antagonist, Clare Quilty.

    In the film, Humbert is a professor of literature who was traumatised at the age of 14 by the sudden death of his adolescent love, Annabel.

    Arriving in a small New England town for a college job, Humbert is about to refuse the humble lodgings offered by widow Charlotte Haze (Melanie Griffith) when he spies her nubile pre-teen daughter Lolita cooling off under a lawn sprinkler, evoking memories of Annabel.

    As Humbert moons around the house transfixed by Lolita, he fantasizes about a natural catastrophe eliminating her grating mother. She in turn conspires to pack her daughter off to boarding school and get her romantic hooks into Humbert.

    Prior to departure, however, Lolita plants a kiss on Humbert that seals his fate as her lover.

    Meanwhile, Charlotte's declaration of love and her request for him to leave if he feels no similar affection give Humbert no choice but to comply and marry her or lose contact with the real object of his obsession.

    Charlotte soon wises up when she reads Humbert's diaries full of rapturous odes to Lolita. In one of literature's great lucky breaks, she dashes out to mail incriminating letters and is hit and killed by a car. Hiding the truth from her at first, Humbert retrieves Lolita from summer camp and takes off on a tour that is both idyllic and doomed, marked as much by constant tiffs as sex games, along dusty Middle American highways to a string of motels.

    The undoing of Humbert's great love proves to be the similarly inclined celebrity playwright Quilty (Frank Langella), who refuses to desist from his pursuit of Lolita.

    Whilst American audiences are still waiting to be able to see "Lolita", the film opens on September 26 in Italy, followed by Spain and Germany. French distributors meanwhile have decided to wait until January to release the film.
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