HENRY AND JUNE
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL
                         OCTOBER 6, 1990

     Henry and June has come with a lot of advance publicity
because it is the first film to be released with the new NC-17
rating (meaning no children under 17 admitted), which has
replaced the X in the Motion Picture Association of America's
rating scheme.

     This picture is of potential interest to women because it is
a serious attempt to translate the work of a gifted and original
woman writer, Anais Nin, into film.  Nin's diaries and other
writings describing her life and sexual coming-of-age in Paris in
the 1930s form the basis for this screenplay written jointly by
Philip and Rose Kaufman.  The director is Philip Kaufman, for my
money one of the very best and certainly one of the most literate
American directors working in Hollywood today (his last film was
The Incredible Lightness of Being).

     The Henry and June of the title are writer Henry Miller and
his bi-sexual wife June and the film is really Anais Nin's
account of how she, living outside Paris with her somewhat stuffy
upper-class young husband Hugo, came to meet and become involved-
-intellectually, emotionally and sexually--with this unique pair
of free spirits from Brooklyn; how she and Henry both ended up
obsessed with and writing obsessively about June (he in Tropic of
Cancer and she in Delta of Venus); and how the intensity of these
passionate and volatile relationships eventually lessened and
they went on to other phases of their lives.

     There is no way of filming this material without sex, and
this has to be the most erotic films ever released to a
mainstream audience.  I didn't count the number of lovemaking
scenes, but there are dozens, in all sorts of permutations and
varieties, as Anais pursues--in her strangely innocent and waif-
like way--her search for sexual experience and pleasure. Even
though these sex scenes are to my mind clearly on the erotic side
of the erotic/pornographic divide (lots of action but no frontal
nudity or genitalia in sight), apparently they proved too much
for a number of people in the audience, and there was a small but
fairly steady stream of people getting up and leaving the theater
throughout the film. I wasn't tempted to leave, since I have no
quarrel with eroticism, but I was bothered by the--not one but
two--scenes in which Anais is forcibly raped (once by Henry
Miller once by her husband Hugo) and ends up apparently enjoying
the experience.  It was also interesting to note how, despite
their professed dedication to openness and honesty and sexual
freedom they seemed to keep getting tangled in lies and
deceptions and jealousy--not quite able to completely shake off
conventional morality, perhaps.

     This is a visually lush and beautifully textured film which
really seems to convey the atmosphere and feel of life in the
Paris of 1931, both in the upper-class circles frequented by
Anais and Hugo and the low-life bohemian world of Miller and his
carnival cronies.  It's a long film that left me, like Anais, at
one point wondering whether June was ever coming back to Paris,
so they could get on with it.  However, it's not boring, it is
frequently very funny, and, it goes without saying, a sensual
feast in every respect. I should also mention that the casting
and the acting in this film are very good indeed.  Fred Ward's
Henry Miller is probably worth an Academy Award nomination and
Maria de Madeiros who plays Anais and Uma Thurman as June are
both also first rate.

    This film won't be everybody's cup of tea.  It resembles a
European art film more than a Hollywood product or a porno flick
and it's good to see a major U.S. studio, in this case Universal,
getting behind it and fighting for its right to be released to
the mainstream adult movie-going public. It was nice to walk
into a theater full of adults and see Henry and June, a film for
adults about a woman's extraordinary sexual awakening.

     For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on
women and film.