Screen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN WHAT WRITERS DO 'HENRY & JUNE' Just as opera characters must sing, movie characters must move or at least give the camera something to look at. But suppose a filmmaker takes a writer as...
...As Nin, Maria de Medeiros takes possession of her role and of the screen with unostentatious authority, as if she had been patiently training for this role, and for stardom, since birth...
...The Kaufmans have done to Nin and Miller what moviemakers have usually done to artists: denatured them...
...Camera tilts down...
...Henry Miller has never been one of my favorite writers, but I fell in love with his personality back in the sixties when young American filmmakers persuaded him to appear in their television documentaries...
...The real June must have been one of those people whose very vacuousness is provocative...
...But wait...
...And she feels assured of her own spiritual growth...
...The fastidious Nin would have shuddered, and Miller, that genius-goon, would have guffawed...
...Third, June is portrayed, right from the start, as little better than a moron...
...Next shot: Henry types...
...Fred Ward gets that magnificent casualness into his performance, plus undertones of self-doubt, vulnerability, naivete, and a touch of the animal...
...The man is actually sitting there typing with a hat on his head...
...RICHARD ALLEVA...
...And so Nin, for whom physical sex was less important than her understanding of sexual psychology, comes across on screen as a self-infatuated nymphomaniac and lesbian manque...
...This is partly the fault of Uma Thurman, whose acquired Brooklyn accent makes June sound retarded and whose every gesture seems jerked out of her by an unseen puppeteer (Philip Kaufman, I presume...
...Next shot: Henry types...
...put on his hat...
...He sits and types...
...Fair enough...
...So we have made a movie about those other things...
...There's a witty visual joke about this problem in Henry and June, which depicts the amorous and literary alliance of Anais Nin and Henry Miller in the Paris of the early 'thirties...
...Henry reads, smiles blissfully, goes back to his typing...
...The camera moves in for a close-up of his tapping fingers, then pulls back...
...Don't you wish you were a writer, too, so you could have as many adventures as Henry Miller...
...brace yourself...
...The camera tilts back to take in the sight of Miller's flatmate, a completely unproductive would-be writer, retiring to his bedroom with a couple of prostitutes...
...But writers do other things than write...
...The postman comes with a letter of reconciliation from Anais...
...Quick fade to black...
...What a friendly braggart...
...Next shot: Henry sits and types...
...Fade to black...
...If the Kaufmans had integrated the expurgated sections with the previously published diary, they might have achieved a balanced view of Nin's spiritual odyssey: of how she grew by trying to understand a wide variety of people, by examining her past, by responding to great works of art and the then current trends in psychology, and, yes, by making love to the people who fascinated her...
...Nin, physically aroused by Miller but emotionally fixated on June, prepares herself for the latter's return by educating herself sexually in several pairs of arms: Miller's, her cousin Eduardo's, and even her own spouse's...
...Observing life, thinking, talking, lovemaking, and writing were at the heart of the life Miller and Nin shared...
...A memorable shot of the Brooklyn couple standing side by side in Nin's living room-Miller lecherously and proudly caressing June's bare neck and shoulder like a racehorse owner patting his favorite filly-fixes the two in Nin's (and the viewer's) mind as twin emblems of Dionysian sexuality...
...Something momentous happened while the camera was off Miller's face...
...What's left...
...Norman Mailer was right when he wrote that Miller was the sort of guy who, upon noticing that a lion had just stalked into the room, would simply mutter, "Well hi ya, fella, how ya doing...
...This movie has two things going for it: a thickly textured and convincing recreation of the bohemian, semicriminal Parisian world that Miller relished, and wonderful performances by the two leads...
...The Kaufmans seem to be saying, "Look, the most important thing a writer does just doesn't hold the screen...
...This scenario keeps the film in forward motion, but three flaws in conception and execution render Henry and June dramatically unsatisfying: First, the Kaufmans have based their script on the until recently expurgated portion of Nin's 1931-34 diary...
...But suppose a filmmaker takes a writer as his protagonist...
...Henry has...
...What an unmalicious egoist...
...But Henry and June doesn't have enough of these other things...
...But in the Kaufman film, the lovemaking eclipses everything else...
...But when June does return, Anais, who has always felt that Miller misunderstood his own wife and misrepresented her in his fiction, finds herself and her own writing rejected by the megalomaniacal June who wants nothing but literary testimonials to her own greatness...
...Her doll-like beauty and aristocratic self-possession are so perfect for this part that one might wonder if any other role will ever be so right for her...
...A cockroach crawls near...
...Is that the sort of thing you want to watch for two hours...
...This excellent gag about the inherent unfilmableness of the writer's central activity is also a sort of apologia for how Rose (scriptwriter) and Philip (scriptwriter and director) Kaufman have treated their two literary protagonists...
...Can you beat that...
...Both Henry and Anais lose June when the latter learns of their affair...
...A writer is a person who sits at a desk accumulating manuscripts...
...But the film's June is so obvious a slut that this diminishes our interest in an Anais Nin who can yearn for her...
...In fact, Medeiros and Ward are so convincing that I often felt I was watching the real Nin and the real Miller strolling through a film that had little use for the diapason of their emotions...
...But listen to the cutting inflection Medeiros gives the simple line, "Look it up," when Miller dares to question her on a point of grammar, and you will realize that this actress has too much wit and too much temperament not to grow...
...Fade to black...
...This style is completely opposed to the styles of the portrayed writers...
...Second, the sexual encounters are filmed in the overripe, pseu-do-misterioso manner of those television perfume ads in which beautiful women, having doused themselves with the recommended scent, are visited by phantom lovers on midnight balconies under cold, all-seeing moons...
...But since the Kaufmans are so fixated on the new sexual revelations, they have in effect hollowed the diary, jettisoned its character analyses (not completely), the crucial reminiscences of Nin's childhood and adolescence (completely), and almost all of her insights into art and psychology...
...Henry is still typing...
...Henry, supported by his wife and various patrons, stays on in Paris to write while June goes back to New York to pursue her (largely illusory) theatrical ambitions...
...These pages deal with Nin's tumultuous sexual adventures and were deleted from her published work because she wanted to spare her husband's feelings...
...Miller flicks it away...
...But, though Anais returns to her husband, she retains Miller's undying devotion and support...
...Near the beginning of the film, Nin, a married woman with limited sexual and literary experience, finds herself attracted to both Miller and his wife June, the latter a strange mixture of gypsy, showgirl, literary groupie, and psychopathic liar...
...They are sex gourmets...
...Real or imagined copulations, heavy-breathing dialogues leading to copulation, and some very conventional sex farce...
...And out of those other things come the inspirations for their creative work...
...About halfway through the movie, Miller, estranged from his lover, is completing Tropic of Cancer...
...There are two scenes in which writing is discussed but the talk is insipid...
...Just as van Gogh was more teeth-gnashing martyr than painter in Lust for Life and Paul Muni's Zola more orator than author, the protagonists of Henry and June aren't really writers...
Vol. 117 • November 1990 • No. 20
