HENRY & JUNE
With Fred Ward, Uma Thurman, Maria de Medeiros, Richard E. Grant, Kevin Spacey, and Jean-Philippe Ecoffey.
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The story begins around the time that Nin (Maria de Madeiros)–married to a devoted and supportive banker named Hugo (Richard E. Grant), whom she lives with outside Paris–meets Miller (Fred Ward), who is sharing a tiny flat with their friend Osborn (Kevin Spacey) in Paris. It continues as she becomes infatuated with him and then with his enigmatic and emotionally scarred prostitute wife June (Uma Thurman) when she arrives from the states. After June returns to Brooklyn, Nin begins an affair with Miller, and both this affair and her infatuation with June are kept secret from Hugh, although he is aware of her fascination with both of them; she also has an intermittent affair with her cousin Eduardo (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey), who has long been smitten with her. Things reach a crisis after June returns from the states, and in the midst of making love with her–an incident which isn’t recorded in Nin’s book–Nin inadvertently reveals that she’s been sleeping with Miller, which leads June to walk out on both of them.
From his three leads, Kaufman has coaxed striking and suggestive performances that give the characters a fair amount of density, despite the fact that the two title characters are filtered through the highly subjective and partial point of view of Nin, which makes them register as fragmented and somewhat incomplete. Miller’s intellectual qualities are undoubtedly short-changed (by the Kaufmans, not Nin), but judging from a French TV documentary on Miller that I saw many years ago, Ward has caught his vocal and facial mannerisms–including such details as his grunts of contentment and his Brooklyn accent–with remarkable accuracy. I can’t vouch for any comparable accuracy where the two women are concerned, but Medeiros and Thurman are certainly vivid and powerful, both leaving impressions that linger.
Similarly, when Nin is shown exploring Miller and Osborn’s apartment for the first time, unaware that anyone else is around, she accidentally stumbles into Osborn’s bedroom, where he’s lying in bed with no less than four naked, nubile women–a moment fully worthy of an Albert Zugsmith classic like The Beat Generation, and one that, like the smug gag with the maid, elicits all the expected titters from the audience. One extended sequence shows the characters with the famous French photographer Georges Brassai (Artus de Penguern), a friend of Miller’s, while he is photographing street life in various locations, and judging from what we see, a folksy accordion player performing evocative French ditties was as essential to Brassai’s artistic technique as his camera–the same jolly peasant turns up everywhere Brassai stations his equipment, apparently performing his cheerful services gratis.
Perhaps if Kaufman were more graceful as a film stylist, and less of a literary director–if, for instance, he didn’t have to rely so much on closeups to create the film’s closeted, stifling hothouse atmosphere–he might have assmilated some of his fanciful background details in a manner that made their stylistic and ideological sources less apparent. But the constant closeups, frequent slow fadeouts and fancy matching cuts, and periodic classical musical cues all make us too aware of the effort involved in putting this world together. It is only in snatches that the characters and settings are fully allowed to take over, without need of Pavlovian reference points–Stravinsky, Satie, gorilla suit, contortionists, scandalized maid, and accordion ditties–to make them viable.
