LO AND BEHOLD
Why can't America see the new "Lolita"?

A LITTLE girl is sitting on her father's lap, with her back to him, reading the funnies. Both parties are wearing pajamas. She is giggling. Gradually, the giggles become gasps. She is catching her breath. The pajamas are not quite in place. The girl is no longer reading. The man is not her father.

This scene comes from Adrian Lyne's new movie of Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," and may go some way toward explaining why the film is unlikely to be shown here. The issue depends on your definition of child pornography. Does it, for instance, mean "any visual depiction...of sexually explicit conduct, where" - and I quote, of course, from Subsection 8B of Section 2256 of Chapter 110 of Part I of Title 18, "Crimes and Criminal Procedure," of United States Code - "such visual depiction is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct"? That "appears to be" is the zinger, for the man in question is Humbert Humbert, played by Jeremy Irons, and the child is Dolores Haze, played by Dominique Swain, who at the time of filming was fourteen years old.

The irony is that the scene presents a witty sandwiching of Nabokov's themes: the sweat of semi-incest is not merely linked but synchronized with the innocent joy of trash culture. In France, needless to say, the coupling is on permanent view. In the city where Maurice Chevalier - creepier, in his bonhomous, tilt-hatted fashion, than any number of Humberts - publicly thanked heaven for little girls, "Lolita" can be viewed any day by anybody. Well, almost anybody: "Int. - 12 Ans," say the movie listings, in unfortunate shorthand. The phrase sounds dirtier than anything onscreen, but it simply means that children under twelve are forbidden to see the movie. quite right, too, although it is hard to imagine such children as the target audience for a story in which they themselves function generically as targets. One of the incidental benefits of Lyne's film is that it reminds us of the original fuss and flap of 1955, the year of the novel's publication, and of 1962, the year of Stanley Kubrick's adaptation; we pride ourselves on having got over those outrages, and it is salutary - even poignant - to rediscover an old shocker that still has the power to shock.

What surprises and shames us about Nabokov's masterpiece, however, is that we are so readily enchanted by matters that should properly repel us, and the new movie works the same trick. It is only a thin shadow of the novel - as any dramatization of the luminous "Lolita" is doomed to be - but it is by no means a travesty. The screenwriter, Stephen Schiff, a staff writer for this magazine, displays a careful, even loving, loyalty to the book; as familiar scenes and lines unroll before us - from the roaring icebox to the gum-like bubble of blood that swells and pops on the lips of the dying Quilty (Frank Langella) - we are reminded of the delicate art of non-transformation, of leaving well alone. In this respect, at least, Lyne's "Lolita," of which I had heard little but dispraise, marks an advance upon the Kubrick version, which mangled the novelist's own screenplay and became, in his words, "a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvellous picture I imagined."

On the other hand, so deftly did James Mason fit and expand our sense of what Humbert is, or should be, that it takes a brave actor to squeeze into what is inescapably a Mason-shaped role. Jeremy Irons is leaner and lankier, and, where Mason's slow grin was wide enough to melt both mother and daughter, the new Humbert seems more pained by the obligation to smile than by his duties in the marital bed of Charlotte (Melanie Griffith). One gift, of course, connects Mason and Irons: they boast two of the most beautiful voices in the history of cinema. The former gave us his Americanized Yorkshire with a faint serpentine hiss; the latter, a lonely drawl. Their only rivals, I think, would be Claude Rains and George Sanders - all or them exiled Englishmen who leave you with the abiding suspicion that there is something dangerous in the deracinated. And that is where Humbert comes in: with his dodgy French boyhood and his weakness for Baudelaire (himself no moral strongman), Humbert finds it not only convenient but arousing to take Lolita everywhere, for he is a man from nowhere. That Nabokov's novel is commonly thought to have ruptured a taboo is the least interesting thing about it; more crucial is the feeling that it waved farewell to romance - the last romantic hero in literature is a pervert, and how could he be anything else? - and, in particular, to the appeal of the cosmopolitan lover. One of Humbert's more insidious crimes is to make you wonder what his gentlemanly forefathers may have done to their daughters; with Isabel out of the way, for instance, what cracks might Gilbert Osmond have inflicted on the porcelain virtue of Pansy?

Jeremy Irons is right, and ripe, for these areas of promising moral rot. Once you've got an Oscar for impersonating Claus von Bulow, the prospect of Humbert Humbert must seem like a day at the office. Iron's best moment in the movie comes as Lolita, on the point of leaving for summer camp, jumps from the car and sprints upstairs for a goodbye kiss. The camera backs away in a panicky rush from poor Humbert, who has no time to prepare for the crown (so far) of his foul career; Irons fusses and pats his pajamas like a schoolboy awaiting the headmaster, or a visit from his parents. It is a tiny hint of the role reversal that will form the basis of his accurate but disreputable plea: "It was she who seduced me."

No one buys Humbert's excuses; Humbert himself offers them as you would a bowl of plastic fruit, aware that they are hollow. Still, it is hard not to wince at the moment, in both novel and film, when knowing Lo, resigned to her role as victim, begins to demand money for services rendered. If one frustrated pedophile feels himself vindicated by Lyne's "Lolita," and thus works up the steam to ply his trade, then the film will have blood on its hands; the question is whether we should have our moviegoing (or our reading) curtailed by that freak possibility. There is a case for arguing that more corrosive damage was done to American morals by the widespread viewing of two earlier Adrian Lyne pictures, "Fatal Attraction" and "Indecent Proposal," than could conceivably be caused by a brief art-house run of "Lolita." A generation of men came out of those raucous hits in the vague belief that women were either mad harridans or gambling chips; Lyne shows far more respect for Dominique Swain than he ever did for Glenn Close or Demi Moore. Thankfully, the dreary erotic gag of her first appearance on the lawn - sprinklers spurting behind her behind - makes way for a more sober style. (Apparently, Miss Swain's mother attended the production in the role of on-set chaperone: a deliciously Charlotte-like deal.) The actress is too old for the part, but, with her leg-swinging boredom and the braces on her teeth, she is not too beautiful, and her untrammelled vitality, which makes Kubrick's Sue Lyon look comatose, allows Lolita to stand proud of Humbert's solipsism, to be more than the sum of his lusts.

None of these niceties, presumably, will dent the determination of the major studios, and it will take a bold (and probably minor) distributors to pick up the movie, much as the novel itself was first issued by a publishing house of known lubricity. It is all too easy, as a Nabokov lover, to forget that for many people out there, especially those who have never read it, "Lolita" remains a dirty book. What chance for the film, then, in a land still ruffled by the unsolved slaughter of a six-year-old beauty queen? The image of Dolores Haze, complete with smeary lipstick and a rocketing temperature, spreading her legs for her legal guardian would not, let us say, sit happily with that of a rouged and bejewelled JonBenet Ramsey. In the years since "Lolita" was written, child abuse has soared up the league of human vice until it is now viewed as worse than murder - understandably so, for it entails the violation of a soul.

In so febrile a climate, it might be prudent to pause before springing "Lolita" on American viewers uncut. Equally, it would be a pity to deny them a chance to make up their own minds, for there are lovely things here: Humbert hanging a sad sweater from a tree for target practice, or lighting a cigarette in a bone-white desert, with a backdrop of mountains already fired up. Apart from the gory guignol of Quilty's demise, Lyne has checked his natural hysteria and produced a slight, tender movie - not, I think, worth fighting a battle over, let alone bringing to trial. If anything, the film is not risky enough: it turns down the bright, rampant polyphony of Nabokov's creation until we are left with a tone of reedy regret. (The film is seldom funny; the novel is seldom anything but.) My overriding memory, as I left the cinema, was of Jeremy Irons quoting Humbert's reveries, in voice-over, to the sound of Ennio Morricone's wonderfully rueful score. Who would have thought that an infamous tale of underage rape would end up sounding like "Brideshead Revisited"? What Vladimir Nabokov, hunter of lost youth and scourge of nostalgia, would have made of it all, we can only guess.