About Adam

It is hard sometimes to imagine what characters in a movie see in each other.

Especially when one man is simultaneously enjoying the favours of three sisters, and he looks like an unshaven layabout with low blood pressure. Adam (Stuart Townsend) is a Dublin Romeo with three Juliets, all sisters, to seduce into bed. The romantic one is Lucy (Kate Hudson, in her angelic Raphael-hair mode from Almost Famous), the bookish one (Frances O'Connor) is Laura and the married one (Charlotte Bradley) is Alice.

Adam is supposed to be a charmer, is never seen at work but apparently thrives as a dealer in art photography which appropriately depends on the beholder's eye for its impact, drives round town in a penis-shaped, powder-blue Jaguar XL left over from the Sixties and spins each girl a different yarn to account for his mysterious lack of parents and provenance.

It would be easier to accept him as a fantasy projection of each girl's dreamboat lover - Laura is significantly writing a thesis on "Hysteria and Lust: Victorian Literary Ladies" - if Townsend didn't make him look and behave like a low-powered lecher who doesn't wash

frequently and whose tales should put any girl instantly on guard against him. In fairness, the part is probably unplayable even by more practised actors, since it requires Adam to be simultaneously a fiancé, seducer, counsellor and son-inlaw.

Written and directed by Dublin playwright Gerard Stembridge, the story covers his relationships with the three sisters (and their brother, played by Alan Maher) from each girl's point of view and is supposed to show a different Adam each time: Townsend just looked the same to me all the time. The film is actually far more revealing about the author's view of women and, as they let wish-fulfilment blind them to Adam's transparent deceits, little of it is flattering. It suggests that women are dumb; women are easy; and women are expendable. Adam is a predatory male chauvinist in trendy sheepskin - flitting without trace around a Dublin which might be anywhere, as it is predominantly stocked with twentysomething slackers in wine bars and fitness clubs.

Adam is maybe not in the same class of silver-tongued mythomaniac as the Playboy of the Western World, but then Synge gave the woman in his play the backbone to stand on her own sturdy feet when the charmer came calling, even if she lamented his hurried leave-taking when found out. The women here are simply pushovers for triumphalist male vanity.

About Adam
Cert: cert12