The familiar storyline of a woman's sexual awakening is apt to feel like a long slog to any spectator not as enchanted with the woman as is the director. Since the woman in question happens to be Anais Nin, the director in question, Philip Kaufman, can count himself a member of a sizable fan club. However, the woman playing her, Maria de Medeiros, comes in with less of a following, in fact virtually none at all, although few would dispute her rightness physically for the role. With her flower-petal face and skull-hugging marcelled hair, she looks authentically old-fasioned, but, alone among the cast, she also acts in that fashion, sort of like a silent-era star who's not yet adjusted to the advent of sound, and she wears out her welcome long before her googoo-eyed and gaga-eyed closeups have climbed into the three figures. Fred Ward wears a bit better as the titular Henry, having (for one thing) to sustain fewer closeups, and capturing much of the unwarranted swagger and gravelly garrulity of the author of Tropic of Cancer. The director, though, joins up periodically in Henry Miller's fan club too, as for example upon the character's first entrance on screen, with the camera starting at the shoes, and close enough to lick them. No less than in his Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kaufman here is a frantically panting culture-hound. On the soundtrack he gives us snippets of Stravinsky, Debussy, Satie; and on the screen itself film clips from Chien Andalou, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Maedchen in Uniform, some photographs of Brassai, not to mention "painterly" images of the director's own devising. By such means, Nin's erotic odyssey from critical apologist for D.H. Lawrence to bedmate of Henry Miller (and, less gymnastically, of Mrs. Miller too -- the titular June) is transformed into a road map for pious pilgrimage. The total effect -- arty, literary, blandly "tasteful" -- is of a kind of Emmanuelle with pretensions. Or at any rate more pretensions. With Uma Thurman. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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