Henry & June
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Movie Reviews of Henry & June
Movie Review: Henry & June Review
Summary: 3 Stars
Beautiful, erotic feast for the eyes. The story drags a bit late in the middle. A great couples movie. Save for one, the characters are difficult to like. Anais must have been a treat to know!Movie Review: Technical Note
Summary: 3 Stars
The DVD is in 1.85:1 not 1.66:1 aspect ratio as indicated on the package or by Amamzon.Movie Review: Women who believe playing heads games by being
Summary: 2 Stars
mysterious in the belief that it makes them "creative" will like this film. As will those who don't (yet) see through Nin's phoniness.
When Nin was having an affair with Otto Rank, she took a trip to the US. As a going away gift, Rank gave her a dress. When she returned he noticed a hole in the dress, cut with scissors. She told him she'd spilled wine on it aboard ship. Actually, what she cut out was a semen stain.
It's easy to be "mysterious" if one is a serial liar.
Other than that, the autobiography, the descriptions of the others in Nin's life at that time (her then-husband being conveniently passive), are interesting a few times through. But Nin's narcissism, head-games, and deceits are quickly more than one can tolerate.
Two stars: one because the film is in color. The other because it has actors/acresses in it. I would have given it a third star because it had words in it, but those were written by Nin, so haven't any particular distinction or value as concerns imparting any substantial truths.
Movie Review: Drags On and On
Summary: 2 Stars
This account of the life and love affair of Henry Miller and Anais Nin seems endless. The director attempts to show character traits and development via an endless parade of sexual liaisons, which becomes more than tedious after the first hour and a half of the movie. Henry, June, and Anais deserve better.Movie Review: As interesting as reading Henry Miller.
Summary: 1 Stars
For all its notoriously explicit subject matter - the story of an affair between two famous writers on sexuality, Anais Nin and Henry Miller, the film features many heterosexual and lesbian couplings, mini-orgies, screenings of period pornography, scenes in bordellos etc. - 'Henry And June' doesn't further the Hollywood biopic beyond the reductive absurdities of the 1930s and 40s. Throughout, the film's grinding (DEFINITELY no pun intended) and endless 130 minutes, I was irresistably reminded of the mythically silly Curtis Bernhardt film about the Brontes, 'Devotion' (1946), which featured the classic exchange: 'Hello, Dickens'; 'Hello, Thackeray'. Kaufman's film groans with moments like these, not just in the introduction of characters - 'This is my friend, the writer Henry Miller...he'll never be published' - but in the way locals greet the bohemian leads ('Bonjour, Mussyuur Meelur' 'Sah vah?'); the way intellectual discussion is reduced to crass platitudes; the telegraphed reminders of cultural or historical signposts (a screening of 'L'Age D'Or' with mild heckling; Hitler bleating on the radio); the dopey use of literal montage (Nin and Miller making love while a pot bubbles, or Hugo plucks the guitar).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.