THE LOSS OF SEXUAL INNOCENCE
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Sony Pictures Classics/Red Mullet film Director: Mike Figgis Writer: Mike Figgis Cast: Julian Sands, Saffron Burrows, Stefano Dionisi, Kelly MacDonald, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Rossy De Palma, Femi Ogumbanjo, Hanne Klintoe
What makes us adults the way we are? Freud gave considerable importance to our upbringing by our parents during the first five years of our lives, with particular emphasis on the emotional (and unconscious sexual) connection from the moment of birth. Very recent studies have downgraded the responsibility of parents for the way we turn out, resting the culpability almost exclusively with our peer groups and our attempts to conform to their standards. As with other issues that get tossed around by intellectuals, the truth is somewhere between. But one thing most people agree upon is the singnificance to many adults of their sexual thoughts and relationships. For all the joys that sex has brought us, it gets us as well into heaps of trouble, as Nic (Mike Figgis's stand-in for "The Loss of Sexual Innocence"), discovers all too well.
Mike Figgis, whose principal claim to directorial fame is his stunning "Leaving Las Vegas"--about a man (Nicolas Cage) determined to drink himself to death and a prostitute (Elisabeth Shue) who demeans herself on a nightly basis--does not simply contemplate his past quite a bit in his latest film. He wants to make sure that folks out there in his movie audience share his recollections. Since 1982 he has planned the making of "The Loss of Sexual Innocence," but until recently did not have the money to pull it off. With the revenue he drew from the success of "Vegas," he now unfolds a picture which is difficult, challenging, and like so many other movies that make demands on audience attention, it rewards those who let the sounds and images of its non-linear structure flow about them. "The Loss of Sexual Innocence" takes as its thesis the view that who we are is determined largely by our sexual proclivities, thoughts, and actions. Figgis pushes his postulate by taking us first (via a fictional character) to his own boyhood days in Kenya, where he remained with his folks until he moved to northern England at the age of eight.
This is no documentary but actually a series of sharply edited vignettes of varying intensity and a striking soundtrack--which offers insights into the filmmaker's principal influences, including the power that music played in his life (he had played trumpet and guitar in rock and roll bands) and the leverage that his stage experience bears on this film. (He was a member of England's foremost avant-garde theatre group, "The People Show," which toured the world and apparently gave him the geographical breadth he puts to such good use in this movie.)
Serving up a series of short stories which exhibits the principal character of Nic (Julian Sands--who appeared as well in "Leaving Las Vegas") at the age of five, at twelve, at sixteen, and as a fully grown man--Figgis frequently cuts for allegorical purpose to biblical scenes of Adam (Femi Ogumbanjo) and Eve (Hanne Klintoe) both at the time of their sexual innocence and after they accepted that offer from a notorious snake.
Figgis opens the film with a sudden, commanding close-up view of the five-year-old Nic (John Cowey), a blond, intelligent, curious young man who symbolically gets his first abbreviated inkling of an approaching sexual life by peeping into an African hut and spying on a half-dressed young woman slowly practicing her English while an old man sits in a chair, seemingly oblivious. The first of the surreal images in the story--essentially highlighting a father's guarding his daughter's or granddaughter's innocence--prefigures an incident that occurs in Nic's teen years, when he makes out with his girl friend Susan (Kelly MacDonald) only to be interrupted by the gruff presence of Susan's father (Bernard Hill).
Now married to a disappointed woman (Johanna Torell), Nic enjoys memories of sexual episodes of his earlier days. At one point he sexually embraces his wife when he is interrupted by an important phone call, while we imagine that many other hugs will be intruded upon by the demands of their child. Sexual thoughts dominate dreams as well. The wife dreams of performing a strip tease to the beats of a jazz piano while Nic conjures up a flirtation with an Italian woman (Saffron Burrows) and as she, her boy friend Luca (Stefano Dionisi) and Nic travel across the Tunisian desert to do a film.
The connection between Adam and Eve's loss of sexual innocence after their partaking of the fruit offered by the snake and the deprivation of Nic's own chastity does not exactly strike us in the face. The Bible is a book of enormous literary value, offering not simply lessons to guide our modern lives but parallels as well. Demonstrating that correlation is a difficult job at best, but Figgis has broken new ground in his original film, one which is filled with a dramatic soundtrack (recorded by Figgis himself), startling and beautiful imagery (particularly of the Blue People of Tunisia), and a compelling cast led by the handsome and magnetic Julian Sands.
Photographer Benoit Delhomme has done a remarkable job of capturing the desolation of southern Tunisia's Saharan region, Italy's Umbria region and the northern English city of Newcastle which is, not surprisingly in the region of the town of Carlisle which was Mike Figgis's birthplace.
Rated R. Running Time: 106 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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