Henry & June (Widescreen)

Fred Ward plays Henry as a crass American with a Brooklyn accent that makes native New Yorkers, such as myself, cringe. He's all man though and it's easy to see why Anais Nin, played by the large-eyed petite Portuguese actress Maria de Medereiros, is attracted to him. Her own husband, Richard E. Grant, is attractive as well, and it's clear that they have a good romantic life together, but he's willing to look the other way at his wife's desire for others. When Miller's wife, June, played by Uma Thurman, a fiery androgynous mother-earth figure, comes on the scene, Anais Nin finds herself attracted to her as well. This sets the scene for some interesting complexities.

The video is two hours and 16 minutes long and I expected to watch only half of it one evening and the rest of it the next night. However, from the moment it started I was completely captured by the story and just had to watch it all the way through. The cinematography is so good that it was even nominated for an academy award, not for just the excellent views of Paris, but for the way the intimate scenes are done which manage to convey the relationships and the sensualities of the moment while avoiding being explicit. The focus is on the romance and the concepts rather than the physical acts. This kept the scenes erotic and it also moved the story forward. I was totally intrigued and kept wondering what would happen next.

The acting was uniformly good, but special note goes to Maria de Medeiros who played Anais Nin. As she works primarily in French films, I had never seen her before. She uses her huge dark eyes and facial expresses so well, that just a glance conveys layers of meaning. She's the focal point of every scene, in spite of the larger and more voluptuous Uma Thurman. And that's exactly what the director intended.

Some might find this film slow as the drama and tension is just about the people, not about world events or outside influence. However, it manages to create a time and a place and people that influenced the literary world as well as the mores of future generations.

After a few viewings of this movie, and readings of Anais Nin's diaries upon which this movie is based, what comes clear to me is that the characters are two halves of a whole person:

1) Anais Nin, the bored housewife who dreams of erotic adventure but feels trapped by, and is financially dependent upon, her husband; June Miller, the worldly woman who shifts between New York and Paris, has affairs with women, and occasionally works as a prostitute to support her husband.

2) Hugo Guiler (husband of Anais Nin), the workaholic banker who eventually comes to be financially responsible for all four protagonists; Henry Miller, the unemployed writer who has abdicated all conventional responsibilities and who is dependent upon the charity of his friends in order to survive.

It's a highly unconventional story to say the least, but that's exactly what makes it so interesting. Watch it with an open mind and you will see that there is more to the story than just sex. You will see four people on a quest for fulfillment and self-discovery, doing so in the context of sexually liberated 1930s Paris.

Anais Nin was arguably the first major writer to ask for writing, especially writing about sex, to be written for and by women, from a woman's point of view and experience, rather than having to make do with the usual hand-me-down male fantasies.
The film tries to show this gap between male and female ways of looking, not only by setting up spectacles in which we concentrate on the voyeurs of each sex, and the different way they react to what they see; but in offering two paralell, gendered narratives. The male story centres on Miller's attempt to write 'Tropic Of Cancer': it is a masculine, linear narrative, which starts with Henry as a hopeless, uncomprehending boor, and ends with the completed manuscript - in other words, a closed narrative leading to quantifiable achievement. Nin's female narrative is more concerned with savouring and analysing every moment, mixing fantasy, dream and reality - although this narrative supposedly charts her development from curious, child-like bourgeois to sexually experienced woman, Nin teaches Miller more than he can ever give her. This difference is shown in the film by the way her major writing is her Journal, open, unplanned, plotless, a work that can only end with her death.

The major problem is that Kaufman doesn't dramatise this opposition. He is only concerned with creating atmosphere, a bogus image of a non-existent France in which amiable peasants play musette, do magic tricks and loiter in the streets; in which orgiastic carnivals drum through the night, and brothels cater to every taste. There is no sense of the deep divisions at the time in France between Right and Left that would lead to the trauma of the Occupation - the protest at the Bunuel film is easily laughed down, whereas in real life it was subjected to fascist vandalism; the policemen are so amiable as to allow themslves be swallowed by the bohemian fun. There is no attempt to account, for example for what it might be truly like to be a prostitute in such a milieu, shorn of the fantasy - these girls have no life beyond their professional duties. The vapid decor and soft-focus cinematography smothers everything in a smooth glow that makes a delapidated tenement as salubrious as a rich banker's mansion. And isn't it a bit off that Nin, one of the leading feminist thinkers of the 20th century, is redcued to being a bad poet of the erotic, and a simperingly infantile one at that (there is little mention of how poor and monotonous a writer Miller truly was - June mockingly compares him to Dostoevsky, but Thurman's performance is so lamentable it doesn't count as a critique). What really exposes this film as a sham is its unimaginative treatment of sexuality - in lingering over naked female flesh, and especially in the soft-porn sapphic grappling, the film ignores Nin's plea and addresses itself to male voyeurs the world over.