Deception review — another film inspired by Philip Roth fails to excite

Has any great novelist inspired as many mediocre films as Philip Roth? That includes you, American Pastoral. Please return my one hour and 46 minutes, The Human Stain. The unlucky run continues with Deception, a misjudged take on Roth’s 1990 novel from Arnaud Desplechin. The text was a meta-fiction, a feted Jewish American writer displaced to London and pursuing an affair amid literary fame.

Now adapting a story of adultery, Desplechin is at once over-faithful and strikingly less than. Slabs of Roth’s dialogue are cut and pasted wholesale, the movie rendered an illustrated audio book. But the “London” it takes place in is ridiculous, a token assembly of rain-spattered windows and a single red phone box. The setting of 1987, meanwhile, is gestured to by the Laura Ashley-ish frocks of Léa Seydoux as the English lover of Philip, played by Franco-Greek actor Denis Podalydès.

That last sentence was not a typo. Talented as Seydoux and Podalydès are, they struggle with the dissonance of this particular story being shot in their own language, with the look and feel of a generic French chamber piece. Without invoking national tropes, that isn’t so fatal for a tale of husbands with lovers whose husbands all have lovers too. But the novel is also bound up with a clash of cultures: the gulfs large and small between New York and Notting Hill, American Judaism and an English whiff of anti-Semitism. Here all that is still talked about but made wholly incoherent by the monocultural Desplechin. Deception is one word for it. Another is absurdité.

★★☆☆☆

On Mubi in the UK from May 21