For Valentine’s Day, we’re once again looking at the wide variety of onscreen relationships: movies about ill-fated couplings, toxic partners, and unconventional romances, to help offset the sticky-sweetness of the season. Follow along here.
The NC-17 rating was intended to open up Hollywood in creative and daring new ways. Sold to the industry as a way to free filmmakers from stifling limitations, it would be free from the historical taboos that had left the X-rating forever associated with pornography and grindhouse horror. Now, the MPAA declared, directors could tell thoroughly mature stories, by and for adults, that could explore topics like violence and sexuality with the dedication they deserve. Of course, the very first film to receive an NC-17, Henry & June, was immediately labelled too sexy for mainstream audiences, thus ensuring that nothing would ever change. It’s a shame, because that film deserves to be seen as more than another example of Hollywood inertia.
Director Philip Kaufman, one of the most underrated figures of the co-called New Hollywood era, has long been fascinated by ideas of voyeurism. His remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is as much a paranoid surveillance thriller as it is about alien aggression. The White Dawn examined the colonialist gaze of white settlers embedded in the Inuit community of Northern Canada as their actions turned from benign to malignant. The Unbearable Lightness of Being saw Kaufman blend that fascination with being watched with a story of human sexuality, as seemingly innocent passions became inextricable from a political agenda. His follow-up, Henry & June, shares a lot of Unbearable Lightness‘s DNA as a story concerned with how watching, being watched, and turning those experiences into art irrevocably shapes us.
The Henry and June of the title are writer Henry Miller and his wife June, but the real focus of the story is his relationship with another writer, Anaïs Nin, who Kaufman met during his pre-director travels through Europe. Nin (Maria de Medeiros) lives in Paris with her sweet but boring husband Ian Hugo (Richard E. Grant) and feels dissatisfied with life as a wife. When she first meets Miller (Fred Ward), he’s working on his first novel and reeks of bad news despite his charm. Their affair is fiery and fulfilling in ways that married life is not, but then Miller’s wife June (Uma Thurman) enters the scene. Their entanglement soon opens up room for one more.
It’s perhaps too fitting that a film about Nin and Miller, two authors whose books were endlessly mired in censorship battles, would be the subjects of the first NC-17 film. It’s easy to dismiss all the works at hand here as “nothing but sex” without examining why the sex is there. For Kaufman, it would have been impossible to explore these truths without showing the ways that eroticism defined them, personally and professionally. It’s initially through sharing their work that Miller and Nin become close, finding common ground in the much-derided literary topic of sex. Miller’s debut novel, Tropic of Cancer, is shaped through their affair, which Kaufman shows as a crucial part of Nin’s growth.
She is a woman constantly looking, taking note of every painful human detail she’s not supposed to notice. When Miller has an uncharacteristically emotional moment where he cries while watching a film, Nin sees it. In one scene, she and Hugo visit a brothel and pay to watch the sex workers. The camera focuses on their stoic faces, almost academic in focus, with a mirror on the wall behind them that shows what they’re seeing. It’s a moment of double voyeurism – watching the characters watch the action while also seeing it ourselves – that hammers home Kaufman’s fascination, shared with Nin, with looking. Sexuality is something to learn from, something as emotionally revealing as your favorite novel.
When June Miller, Henry’s young and vivacious bohemian wife, arrives, Nin is as drawn to her as she is Henry. She approaches an affair with her as matter-of-factly as she did with the husband, a moment of surprising frankness for a film from 1990 (although it’s also probably the unashamed queerness of the movie that earned it that NC-17 rating). But theirs is also an affair doomed to end poorly. Both Nin and Miller are writers who plunder their lives for inspiration, and June never gets to be more than a muse for both. When she reads her husband’s creative reimagining of her life, she’s devastated by what she sees as his distortion of her truth. In real life, June Miller was vocal in her distaste for how both Miller and Nin depicted her.
In the end, Nin’s time with the Millers is seen as a liberating thing free of shame, if not regrets. It would help to birth the Anais Nin who redefined a generation’s attitude towards feminine sexual liberation. So maybe it was inevitable that Henry & June would be hindered in America by a newly formed rating that couldn’t escape the taboo nature of sexual frankness. Alas, it’s a film still largely defined as a quirk in the system. Kaufman’s open and literary approach to sex and eroticism surely deserves better.
“Henry & June” is not available to stream, because of course it isn’t. You can buy it on Blu-ray — if you have a multi-region player.
