A sexy movie with two very interesting faces - Maria de Medeiros and Uma Thurman - and one ugly and obnoxious one (Fred Ward, playing American writer "Henry Miller.")

I wish Thurman had a bigger role in this movie. The photo of her in this picture - the one Ward stares at periodically - is one of the most fascinating portraits I've ever seen. De Medeiros is shown naked quite a bit but it's her face, with those big eyes and the 1930s look, that's interesting. The nudity and lesbian sex scene gave this a NC-17 rating, the first movie ever to get that rating (from what I read.),and deservedly so. In Paris in the 1930s, where this story is set, they were "ahead" of their time (secuarly speaking) regarding decadence. This movie captures that atmosphere, although it's a bit TOO sleazy at times.

The film features some wonderful photography. One of the best cinematographers in the business, Phillipe Rousselot, filmed this. The worst part of the film was simply no likable characters and a bit too many dull spots. But.....the film really offers some visual treats.

In 1931 Paris, French authoress Anaïs Nin, doing a study on D.H. Lawrence, finds herself intrigued by different variations of sexuality; she and her husband Hugo Guiler are drawn into friendship with Americans Henry Miller and his volatile bisexual wife, June. Miller, the unpublished New York writer just on the verge of a breakthrough with "Tropic of Cancer", sees Anaïs as a sexy child and has a half-hearted affair with her, but June Miller's feelings seem to go much deeper. Maria de Medeiros as Nin has a marvelous face and graceful manner that nearly manage to keep this handsome but unenlightening sexual odyssey together. Director Philip Kaufman hopes to be as uninhibited as his characters but, despite an NC-17 rating, his sexual sequences feel truncated (and when nudity is trotted out--as in the whorehouse sequence--it fails to stand in for true eroticism). Fred Ward, always worth a look, seems held back as Miller, restrained, and he's not helped by a bald plate which at times looks unconvincing; Uma Thurman has a smaller role as June, and Kaufman allows her to pose and smolder a bit too much, but she's looser on the screen and brings the narrative some much-needed danger. The picture has a lot of ambiance and is briskly paced and fancifully told, but it just doesn't succeed at being a risk-taking exploration of human sexuality simply because Kaufman takes so few risks. ** from ****

Why is it that movies that are groundbreaking and controversial because of their prurient content are almost always never really great films to begin with? "Deep Throat" (1972) was the very first hardcore porn film that modern-day audiences went to see in droves, yet it was not a good movie, and was far from erotic or sexy. "Fritz The Cat" (1972) was the first animated motion picture to be rated X, yet it was a series of vignettes with a character who was really a jerk. With its shock value, it was underwhelming at best.

"Henry & June" does not sound like a controversial movie, but it made movie history when it became the first mainstream motion picture to earn the NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. That rating was the permanent replacement for the X rating to differentiate explicit mainstream films from pornographic films in the eyes of moviegoers. While it's easy to see why the movie got an NC-17 rating, it's not a very good movie otherwise overall.

"Henry & June" is based on a true story that was brought to the public's attention from diaries written by Anais (pronounced en-NIGH-eese) Nin. Nin is portrayed by Maria de Medeiros, who is the best actor in this film by far, and really saves it from being a forgettable mess. In fact, the film centers so much on Medeiros' character that you sometimes wonder as you're watching this film "What's so great about Henry & June? Why wasn't the film called "Anais"?"

Well, Henry is Henry Miller (Fred Ward),an American author who resides in Paris, France to complete a book he wants to title "Tropic of Cancer". He finishes the novel, but it becomes one of the most controversial books of the 20th century. More on that later.

June (Uma Thurman) is Henry's wife who feels more like an on-again, off-again girlfriend. She is an actress who is also from the United States. She's married to Henry, but they fight, and she travels back to the U.S. This happens about three times in the film.

Thurman is a very good actress who was great in "Dangerous Liasons" (1988) and later in "Pulp Fiction". Here, her acting felt stiff and forced, not only with her bad New York accent which sounded like a horrible impression of Mae West. I just really wasn't convinced when she fought with Ward on screen. I detected no emotion of any kind when she was supposed to be emotional, and you could almost see the traces of glycerin when she was supposed to cry.

Another person who acted pretty badly here was Richard E. Grant, who played Anais' husband Hugo Guiler. It seemed like Grant's main role in this film was to criticize Anais for not coming to social functions, and to turn the other eye when Anais had affairs with both Henry and June. Maybe that was the point of his role, but Grant was not even the slightest bit convincing. Every line he spoke sounded as if he was reading it from a cue card.

So this film is about decaying marriages in the midst of Paris and a social circle of struggling writers, and was very reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" in many respects. So why did it deserve the NC-17 rating?

My opinion is that it didn't, and it seemed as though the filmmakers threw in prostitutes and nudity in an attempt to purposefully go beyond the R-rating. Even then, I thought the sex scenes, especially the ones with prostitutes, didn't contribute well to the story at all. As I watched these scenes progress, I couldn't help but think, "What does this have to do with anything!?!?!" Such prolonged sex scenes weighed the story down and slowed the film's pace to a dull crawl.

Because of its rating, "Henry & June" made movie history, but the film spent two hours and seventeen minutes telling a story that could have been told in an hour and fifteen minutes. While Medeiros and Ward acted well in their parts, Thurman and Grant were noticeably weak. The provocative scenes this movie provided may have been erotic, but often times felt unnecessary to the plot. It's too bad also, because the movie's rating gives this film a significance that it really never deserved.