Henry & June

Henry & June tells the story of American writer Henry Miller(Fred Ward) and his wife June(Uma Thurman) as seen through the eyes of Anais Nin(Maria de Medeiros), and here is the film's biggest problem, it is told from the wrong prespective. Anais is a spoilt emotianlly immature woman who seeks sexual exprementation for no reason other then lust in the guise of artful reasoning like "I need to know people who are alive." The film would have much more involving had it been told from Henry's point of view. As played by Fred Ward he is brutish, easy going, funny and exhilerated by the sexual liberty in 1930s Paris. He is a man who cries when watching his actress wife in an erotic film. Unlike Anais he actually has feelings that the audience can identify with. Perhaps this was unavoidable as the film is adapted from Anais Nin's diaries.

The most interesting character in the film is Henry's bisexual wife June. Played by Uma Thurman with a deep throaty voice, we see her at first as an opportunistic woman who uses sex to advance her interests, but as the film progrsses we learn that a real pain and self loathing is hidden under her sleak exterior. She is alaways emotionally blackmailing Henry and Anais, to make her a more noble figure in their books. This is one of Uma Thurman's best performances, she delivers her lines with a throaty sexuality, "I've made mistakes, but I've made them superbly" she says.

Due to the overtly erotic nature of the film, it becomes emotionally aloof. Romance and erotica are polar opposittes. In a love scene, the less you know about the people involved the more erotic it is, but less romantic. Most of the naked women in Henry & June are extras, and the lead character Anais is a mystery anyway. The result is visually gripping but emtionally uninvolving. Philip Kaufman's 1988 masterpiece The Unbearable Lightness of Being was also erotic, but that film was much more effective because he made you care about the characters before they got naked.

The best thing about Henry & June is the details. You could watch this film with absolutely no dialogue and not lose anything. The recreation of 1930s Paris is a feast for the eyes, and Philippe Rouselot's cinamatagrphy is beautiful. I loved how the film re-created parts of that era, the underground lesbian clubs, the semi-nude parades in the streets, the old cinemas where the characters watch Luis Bunuel's then scandlous UN CHEIN ANDALOU and a particularly amusing group of magicians who pick pockets as a side job.

Early on in the film Henry Miller criticises D.H. Lawrence "He makes too much out of sex, he makes a damn gospel out of it, my way sex is natural like birth or death". I don't know if this criticism is apt for Lawrence but it certainly would be for the director of this film Philip Kaufman.


Captures the endemic seach for liberation in 1930's Paris   October 26, 2002
Linda Linguvic (New York City)
74 out of 77 found this review helpful

This 1990 film, directed by Philip Kaufman, is set in Paris in 1931. This was a time and place between the two world wars that attracted writers and artists to a bohemian lifestyle, a time of discarding old conventions and embracing experimentation. Here, Henry Miller, an American expatriate wrote his wildly erotic books, which were banned in the United States. And Anais Nin, known for her extensive diaries about her sensory experiences, began her literary career here. It's no wonder that the two of them would meet and couple. They were both married at the time and this film is about the complex relationships between Henry, Anais, and their respective mates, all searching of a kind of liberation which was endemic at the time.

Fred Ward plays Henry as a crass American with a Brooklyn accent that makes native New Yorkers, such as myself, cringe. He's all man though and it's easy to see why Anais Nin, played by the large-eyed petite Portuguese actress Maria de Medereiros, is attracted to him. Her own husband, Richard E. Grant, is attractive as well, and it's clear that they have a good romantic life together, but he's willing to look the other way at his wife's desire for others. When Miller's wife, June, played by Uma Thurman, a fiery androgynous mother-earth figure, comes on the scene, Anais Nin finds herself attracted to her as well. This sets the scene for some interesting complexities.

The video is two hours and 16 minutes long and I expected to watch only half of it one evening and the rest of it the next night. However, from the moment it started I was completely captured by the story and just had to watch it all the way through. The cinematography is so good that it was even nominated for an academy award, not for just the excellent views of Paris, but for the way the intimate scenes are done which manage to convey the relationships and the sensualities of the moment while avoiding being explicit. The focus is on the romance and the concepts rather than the physical acts. This kept the scenes erotic and it also moved the story forward. I was totally intrigued and kept wondering what would happen next.

The acting was uniformly good, but special note goes to Maria de Medeiros who played Anais Nin. As she works primarily in French films, I had never seen her before. She uses her huge dark eyes and facial expresses so well, that just a glance conveys layers of meaning. She's the focal point of every scene, in spite of the larger and more voluptuous Uma Thurman. And that's exactly what the director intended.

Some might find this film slow as the drama and tension is just about the people, not about world events or outside influence. However, it manages to create a time and a place and people that influenced the literary world as well as the mores of future generations.


HENRY MILLER ACCORDING TO ANAIS NIN   April 27, 2000
wdanthemanw (Geneva, Switzerland)
20 out of 21 found this review helpful

At least two movies of Philip Kaufman will stay in movie history, THE RIGHT STUFF and HENRY & JUNE. Produced by Philip Kaufman's son, co-written with his wife Rose Kaufman, HENRY & JUNE is a family affair. One could say that it is a european movie filmed in an american manner. Don't get me wrong, it's a compliment !

Fred Ward as Henry Miller, portuguese actress Maria de Medeiros as Anais Nin and Uma Thurman as the woman inspiring the two writers, Richard E. Grant and Kevin Spacey in smaller parts, the whole cast gives a superb performance. Don't expect pornographic scenes in HENRY & JUNE, sex is more suggested than showed. Philip Kaufman is interested in the relation between Henry and Anais and doesn't follow Henry Miller in his multiple adventures in Paris' brothels.

Henry Miller lives in a Paris that Federico Fellini could have created : enjoy this carnaval full of fellinian faces or Henry Miller's neighbors (you can recognize among them french clown Pierre Etaix in one of his last performances). Philip Kaufman has recreated the Paris which was the center of such movies as Marcel Carne's LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS or LE JOUR SE LEVE. Poetic realism was the name of this french movement of the 1935-1945 period.

Average extra-features but over the top audio and video transfers.

A DVD for your library.


Literate Passion   April 12, 2001
Moira
20 out of 21 found this review helpful

One of the most underrated movies of the 90s. (It also marks a disappointing moment when the studio _could_ have backed up an NC-17 film not porn but meant for _real_ adults....but caved to puritanism instead). The top two reasons to see it are the performances of Maria de Medeiros as Anais Nin (it's almost a reincarnation) and Uma Thurman as June, two of the sexiest, most intelligent, passionate portrayals of women in recent cinema. Forget Thelma and Louise -- these two are a combustible pair. Fred Ward's performance as Henry Miller, too low-key, is pretty much lost in the shuffle, without any of the dynamic magnetism Miller had in spades. The movie explores the nature of desire, infatuation, obsession, and real love, and is pretty faithful to the actual events -- but some elements (such as the significance of June's puppet Count Bruga, made for her by her lesbian lover, Jean) are lost in the translation to the screen. For people bored to tears by the dichotomy of soulless porn on the one hand and Hollywood mush on the other, this is an intelligent and _sexy_ movie. Two lovely companion books are Anais Nin's diary "Henry and June," on which the movie was based, and Nin's and Miller's unexpurgated letters, "A Literate Passion." That title sums up both their lives and the movie based on them.


As interesting as reading Henry Miller.   February 25, 2002
darragh o'donoghue (dublin, ireland)
18 out of 34 found this review helpful

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.