Post- Bounce, and post-Paltrow, Affleck wandered into the paparazzi flash of tabloid land, embarking on a relationship with Jennifer Lopez (now rekindled, two decades later) after meeting on the set of the infamous 2001 bomb Gigli, a movie I watched for the first time a few months ago. Bounce is one the better performances to come out of Affleck’s first celebrity epoch, mostly because of how he, well, bounces off of his scene partner. There’s precious little room for the kind of glossy production whose core raison d’etre is offering audiences the chance to see a pair of stars doing their magnetic thing together. We don’t see as much of that these days, perhaps because studio-approved mega-stars are mostly caught up in sexless action franchises. Rewatching the film is a bracing reminder of Paltrow’s actorly charisma (maybe she could consider coming back to the profession?) and of how far a film can sustain itself on star chemistry alone. Whatever was actually happening on set works a charm in the film: they have an easy, inviting rapport, he mitigating his smarm with genuine decency, she playing the weary pragmatism of grief instead of its big emotion. The lore goes that Affleck and Paltrow got back together as a real-life couple while filming Bounce, breaking up again shortly before the film’s release. Perhaps the catharsis of their off-camera relationship came in the detente outside of the immediate world of the film, they could just be relatively normal people exploring a mutual attraction, rather than miserable game-players pressing one another’s buttons. Their relationship is pitched at an odd angle-there is definitely sexual chemistry passing between them, but there is also a cold antagonism that overwhelms that pheromone heat. The film is now a piece of evidence, in a way, a document that could reveal just when, exactly, these two first decided to take a fictional relationship into the real world.Īffleck and de Armas play Vic and Melinda, a wealthy, unhappily married couple flouncing around New Orleans, seemingly caught in a prolonged arrested adolescence as they go to parties, flirt, fight, and. Though the relationship has since ended, curiosity about the pair’s on-screen chemistry was enough to compel many people-or, at least, many people I know-to watch Deep Water when it was finally released on Hulu last week. Their couplehood was one of the most agreeably distracting narratives of the early pandemic, a showmance between a complicated movie star in yet another period of rebirth and an up-and-comer poised for big things. It is, of course, the fact that the film’s stars, Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, fell in love-or, at least, into a relationship-while filming the psychosexual thriller. The most notorious thing about Deep Water, the new film from Adrian Lyne (his first in 20 years), is neither its director nor its Patricia Highsmith pedigree.

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