Henry
and June (1990), based on writer Anais Nin’s
diaries about her erotic awakening, is perhaps best known for
being the first movie to earn an NC-17 rating, and for Uma Thurman's
performance as one-half of a married couple who unwittingly
become involved with the same woman.
Directed
by Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness
of Being), who also penned the screenplay with his wife,
Rose, Henry and June is set in Paris in 1931 and revels
in the bohemian spirit of that era. It
is peopled with contortionists, starving artists, and the loose,
carefree love of the interwar years—not to mention an endless
amount of smoking and drinking, which undoubtedly made those
bohemians that much more carefree.
Nin,
played with a wide-eyed, sylph-like innocence by Maria de Medeiros,
is married to young banker Hugo Guiler (Richard E. Grant), who
is happy enough to entertain his wife’s burgeoning eroticism
and seems content to turn a blind eye to her affairs.
When
Anais first meets brash American writer Henry Miller (Fred Ward)
she is instantly drawn to his larger-than-life energy. He talks
with a Brooklyn accent and smokes like a fiend, oozing a macho
bravado that sometimes seems too ridiculous to be real. But
still she is captivated by him, and even gives him her typewriter
so that he can continue working on his novel.
The
film really takes off when Anais pursues Henry to a
seedy movie theater where he is watching his wife, June, on
the big screen. After he flees the theater, Anais catches up
with him and they go to a decrepit café where Henry tells her
all about his wife and their less-than-ideal marriage. June,
played with a thick Brooklyn accent by Uma Thurman, is a sensuous,
husky beauty who loves to play muse to struggling artists—male
or female.
It
isn’t long before Anais meets June, and they are instantly drawn
to each other. Early in their acquaintance, the two couples—Henry
and June, and Anais and Hugo—go to the cinema together to see
Maedchen in Uniform,
a German film about a female schoolteacher who falls in love
with one of her female students. Seated next to each other in
the audience, June whispers to Anais, “You’re like the schoolteacher.
I’m like the young girl.”
Despite
the fact that June is clearly acting the part of the seductress,
her earthy sexuality makes her false naiveté somehow forgivable.
Later
on, June takes Anais to a basement lesbian bar filled with butches
(who instantly try to pick up June) and femmes. After a few
drinks Anais and June dance together, and Anais tells her, “I
want to be innocent like you.”
The
relationship between June and Anais is full of a heightened
passion that results in sentences dripping with melodrama, but
Thurman invests June with such a passionate, visceral sexuality
that the melodrama seems more like guttural manifestations of
desire than cheesy soap opera hijinks.
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