Henry and June. - movie reviews

National Review, Dec 3, 1990 by John Simon

less distasteful in its own way is the ludicrous Henry & June, based on the recently published unexpurgated diaries of Anais Nin and the, so we are told, "autobiographical novels" of Henry Miller. Directed by Philip Kaufman and scripted by himself and his wife, Rose, it was produced by Kaufman fils, Peter.

The Kaufmans are as much a cinematic cottage industry in today's San Francisco as Henry Miller and Ana% Nin were an erotic-autobiographical one in the Paris of the early 1930s. Though Anais was not unhappily married to a nice, rich Boston banker, Hugo Guiler, she remained unfulfilled until her affair with Miller, a sort of one-man diapason of expatria Americanism, and with Miller's ex-taxidancer wife, June, who would drop in for brief stays before high-tailing it back to New York and other entanglements.

However incontinent, prolix, and repetitious, Henry Miller was a writer. In the very American tradition of Dreiser and Wolfe, he lacked economy and shapeliness, but, unlike them, had a nonparochial outlook and a sense of humor. Yet his books are not filmable (cf. Tropic of Cancer and Quiet Days in Clichy) because what makes Miller's writing interesting is not the bohemian excesses, but the translation of world into word, the very thing the camera cannot render.

What the Kaufmans have foolishly done is to swallow Anais Nin whole. She, unlike Miller, was no writer, but a self-absorbed, self-important gusher. To read Nin is to be a spectator at a masturbation marathon, where instead of a field of runners we get a single self-enamored dawdler in a miasma of clammy self-regard. And that's what infests both the visual and verbal aspects of this gee-whiz movie, in which reverence for the ninny Nin is swathed in wide-eyed shlurpings of sophomoric sex. The presposterous rat-a-tat of the Coens's toy machine guns corresponds here to the endless thrashings and wallowings of heterosexual or lesbian lovers, filmed without an ounce of imagination, genuine eroticism, or aesthetic sensibility.

Thus we get Maria de Medeiros, a Portuguese-born French actress, who, though she can't act much, manages the remarkable feat of being physically even more off-putting than Nin, whom she does, indeed, resemble. (The one time I met the prototype, I was suffocated in equal measure by her vapidity and unsightliness.) To have to hear through much of the film Nin's voiceover effusions ("Last night I wept, I wept because the process by which I have become a woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child . . . I wept because I could not believe any more, and I love to believe. . . . I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence . . . ...) while watching de Medeiros's deconstructed-Kewpie doll face-over-sized and deliquescent saucer eyes, nasty little pointy chin, nastier huge pointy beak-exude mimosaceousness all over the place is exquisite torture.

June is played by Uma Thurman, who looks like a slightly sexier Elsie the Cow, and whose acting consists of either skulking or stripping, and a Brooklyn accent so bad I thought she must be English till I learned she grew up in New York. The film allows the two women oodles of heavy-breathing foreplay but no consummation. That is reserved for Anais and Henry's even heavier-breathing, protracted and recurrent tumbles, lacking, however, any of the joie de vivre of Henry's prose. We get a lot of lip-smacking ogling of indistinct bodies weltering, with even more careful ogling of the rating board, so as not to forfeit its new adult rating, NC-17. Along with this, Nin's nauseating prattle about "innocence," about how "innocent' sexual experimentation and lesbian epiphanies make her feel. Sex becomes a kind of alternative Sunday school for self-righteous liberals, a posture the Kaufmans assume with exemplary sanctimony.

Heavy breathing, combined with sensitive nostril flaring, reaches its apogee when, in quest of greater liberation, Anais and spouse visit a brothel for a lesbian exhibition by two unprepossessing but heuristic whores-one of whom looks like June, the other like Anais-which turns on Hugo and sends Anais into ecstasies of self-recognition and heightened innocence. The sex scene is of the kind one gets in soft-core porn houses that liberally display self-awarded XXX ratings. Other scenes, intended as a cross-section of colorful life among Parisian bohemia, remind me in their naive clumsiness of nothing so much as Alan Rudolph's near-imbecile The Moderns. Fred Ward, one of Pauline Kael's favorite San Franciscans (Phil Kaufman is another) plays Miller with a slightly better Brooklyn accent, an unpersuasive bald patch, and a conspiratorial smirk consisting of a tilted head in which the lower eye crinkles up more than the upper one.

I have no idea why Miss Kael did not herself review the movie in The New Yorker, unless it was to allow her henchman and clone, Terrence Rafferty, to show how well he has mastered her technique as he turns near-loss of balance into a "sense of precariousness [that] makes watching Henry & June so exciting" and provides "stimulating unease [that] carries over into our reflections" after we leave the theater. Actually, with their over-lapping Millers, the Coens and the Kaufmans manage to give "family picture" a new and worse meaning.