Lolita (1997 film)

Lolita is a 1997 film directed by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain. The film is an adaptation of the novel by Vladimir Nabokov. This novel had already been made into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 under the name Lolita.

Plot

Professor Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons) accepts a position at Beardsley University, before that he has a whole summer to move, so he decides to go live in a small town called Ramsdale where he pays a courtesy visit to the house of Charlotte Haze (Melanie Griffith) who offers her lodging, Charlotte is the mother of a beautiful 12-year-old girl named Dolores "Lolita" Haze (Dominique Swain) who resembles Humbert's old childhood love Annabel and Humbert becomes obsessed with Lolita.

Charlotte falls in love with him and they eventually get married. For Humbert, it was the only way to continue being close to Lolita whom he had sent a few days before to a summer camp to immediately send her to a Catholic boarding school. Then, his mother discovers a diary that Humbert kept hidden, where he described the deep-rooted contempt he had for her and narrated the love he had for "Lo", so he decides to leave it and go with his daughter, who was in a camp for girls, but dies immediately after in a traffic accident. Because of that, Humbert decides to go look for Lolita at the summer camp, but he doesn't tell her that her mother has died. In this way, Humbert and Lolita go on a vacation trip.

During the trip Humbert tells Lolita that her mother had passed away, and Lolita continues with him because she "has nowhere else to go". Humbert realizes that a man is following them and suspects that he is a policeman, but the reality is that the man is also interested in Lolita. This fact provokes Humbert's jealousy and sometimes the belief that he was imagining everything.

After a long journey, Humbert and Lolita settle in Beardsley, where he eventually takes over as a professor at the university and Dolores "Lolita" She attends a religious school for girls. The relationship between the two is increasingly tense due to the teacher's jealousy and the fact that Lolita is not attracted to him and they only had sex if he offered her something in return; Lolita planned to escape from her with the money that Humbert gave her.

Humbert is torn between the paradoxical situation of being her stepfather and also her lover. After a strong argument in which he hits her and she runs away yelling "murderer" at him, Lolita returns and proposes that he embark on a second trip, both motivated by different reasons: Humbert's to fix the relationship, and Lolita follow the plan proposed by the pursuer, the supposed policeman who had already contacted her to betray Humbert. One night, Lolita becomes seriously ill and Humbert leaves her admitted to a hospital. The next day, he finds out that the pursuer, posing as her uncle, has taken her away. Humbert then begins an investigation throughout the country, but to no avail, which leaves him plunged into enormous depression and loneliness.

Years later, a letter arrives from Lolita asking for financial help. Humbert comes with her money, but with her firm conviction to get it back and find out who the man was who had taken her away from him, so she can kill him. Once he arrives at Lolita's new house, he finds her married and pregnant. She tells him what happened since they separated: she ran away with Clare Quilty, a playwright linked to the world of child pornography, the same one who was chasing them and whom Humbert believed was a policeman, but she left him when he asked her to be participant in his pornographic films.

After that, Lolita met and married another man named Dick. Deciding to take revenge on everyone, Humbert kills him after a brief struggle and pursuit of the playwright Clare Quilty, whom he finds on his estate and after a series of vain proposals from the playwright to Humbert. Finally Humbert allows himself to be arrested and is taken to jail for this crime, where he died that same year of a coronary thrombosis and the following Christmas Lolita died giving birth to a stillborn.

Cast

• Jeremy Irons Like Humbert Humbert.
• Dominique Swain like Dolores “Lolita” Haze.
• Melanie Griffith Like Charlotte Haze.
• Frank Langella Like Clare Quilty.
• Pat Pierre Perkins like Louise, the maid.
• Emma Griffiths Malin like Annabel Lee, Humbert's childhood girlfriend.
• Erin J. Dean like Mona, Lolita's friend.

Awards and nominations

National Board of Review

Chicago Film Critics Association

MTV Movie Awards