HENRY & JUNE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Anais Nin's affair with Henry Miller as
recounted in her diary may well be pretentious enough to have
pleased her. This is a film with a lot of sex and very
little eroticism as Nin demurely and sensitively has sex with
anyone who will stand still and then describes it in perfumed
prose in her diaries. Rating: -1 (-4 to +4).
Take these comments with a grain of salt. Films about people's sex and love lives somehow just do not appeal to me, even from excellent filmmakers such as Woody Allen or Philip Kaufman. I rate them much lower than other people seem to. Not that sex itself cannot be interesting, but even a Woody Allen agonizing over why he cannot bed Diane Keaton is for me the formula for a total yawner. Philip Kaufman's last film, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, while much in this genre, did have enough substance besides the sexual maneuvering that it held my interest. His current HENRY AND JUNE is a long film, but not nearly as long as it seems. In spite of the title, the film is mostly about Anais Nin and her early 1930s affair with Henry Miller. The film is based on the account in her memoir of the same title. She makes herself out to be small and in some ways strong, but in most ways she is fragile. She is not entirely satisfied by her banker husband Hugo and is attracted to virile American writer Henry Miller. Awakened by his presence, she proceeds in her frail, sensitive way to have sex with everyone in reach but the housemaid and perhaps the dog (though the dog wasn't talking). She also has a stimulating intellectual relationship with Miller, who is straight-laced enough to limit his sexual partners to only the members of the opposite sex within reach. When one of them is not making love, he or she is agonizing, writing books, or riding bicycles.
Most of the story is told in Nin's voice, which is an acquired taste like candied violets. The camera adopts a soft focus to mirror her writing style. One set, apparently near the house where much of the action happens, is a long walkway next to a wall in night and fog. It looks very much like an impressionist painting. I was hoping we would see it in the daytime or at least without fog, but we never do. I remember no other fog in the film and it is there apparently mostly for effect.
Kaufman underscores that most of what we are seeing is from Nin's point of view by having one sequence be a flashback narrated by Miller. The soft focus is banished and the prose changes to a hard-boiled Raymond Chandler style. Even in Nin's style Fred War may be trying to affect Miller's character but it comes out like Humphrey Bogart. Maria de Medeiros' Nin is a dictionary illustration for "demure" and often also for "naked." Kaufman has created a tremendous number of nude positions for couples in which the parts that would be most busy are out of sight, perhaps trying for an R rating, or perhaps affecting Anais Nin's point of view. (Of course, the film got first an X rating and then inaugurated the NC-17 rating.) "June" refers, incidentally, to Miller's wife, played by Uma Thurman, who usually is not around.
The film is constantly melodramatic, with deep people feeling deep emotions which we are told about cheaply and superficially. You know you're in trouble when characters start voicing lines like, "Does she think she can love anything in you I haven't loved?" Even if these are real people, these people aren't real. My rating: -1 on the -4 to +4 scale. It might have been lower but for the peculiar background created of Paris in the 1930s.
Mark R. Leeper
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