HENRY & JUNE
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1990 Frank Maloney
This is the first NC17 movie, a fact which will no doubt put you in good stead in some future trivia game. The movie is considered too much for kids, but too good not to be rated and given entree to the world's multiplexes.
The most "unconventional" thing about HENRY & JUNE is the lavish scenes of sex between women. As a gay man, I have to say that I grew a trifle restive at so much of it, even if the photography was uniformly excellent and the actors attractive and interesting people. All I'm saying is that the sex, the eroticism is not, for me, the reason to see HENRY & JUNE.
Acting, script, character development -- these are the reasons to see HENRY & JUNE. The three principals -- Fred Ward as Henry Miller, Uma Thurman (DANGEROUS LIAISONS) as his wife June, and Maria de Madeiros as Anais Nin -- give magnificently complex performances. Of the three, Madeiros is the most attractive, but Thurman is the most interesting. June is in many ways the focus of the film since both Miller and Nin not only sleep with her (as well as each other) but write books about her.
Nin is the narrative focus of the film, which is about, inter alia, her relationships with the title characters; she is in every scene; she is the narrator; it is through her eyes and her diaries that we see the world. And Madeiros is wonderfully right. She looks like Nin, small, strong, huge-eyed, unblinking, all-seeing, very private, very open.
Fred Ward's Miller is less successful only by comparison. Miller is portrayed very much as a traditional man, blind to who the women in his life were except insofar as they were extensions of himself. As a man, he is limited in what he can see, feel, or think. These things, I think, are how Nin sees him, regardless of how he was.
But always I come back to Thurman's June: whore, muse, patrona, con-woman, strong, intensely afraid of death. Obsessed with finding a great writer who could portray her as she felt she was; always disappointed, angry, loving, ungrateful, impossible, manipulating, independent, clinging. It is as complete a a portrait of a human being as I have ever seen on film and a stunning achievement for the actor.
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Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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