Movie Review: 'Love Affair' (1994)

Warren Beatty and Annette Bening star in a high-glitz remake of a movie that was lousy to begin with — the 1957 romantic gusher An Affair to Remember. Once again, the two characters meet, fall in love, and agree to prove their passion by reuniting atop the Empire State Building. But on her way to the fateful encounter, Bening is hit by a car and paralyzed from the waist down. The most convincing scenes are the early ones, in which Beatty and Bening playfully reenact the genesis of their own love affair. After that, the moviemakers resurrect the earlier film's sodden masochism with meticulous fidelity. Women may be the only ones who ''get'' An Affair to Remember, and perhaps they'll get Love Affair, too. But what they're getting — the glorification of prim suffering — is something they've been trying for too long to get beyond. C