Henry & June

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 Miller, the unpublished New York writer just on the verge of a breakthrough with "Tropic of Cancer", sees Anaïs as a sexy child and has a half-hearted affair with her, but June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 ****