User reviews

The warning flag goes up for me when a filmmaker makes a film about filmmaking: that his breadth of life experience does not go beyond his immediate enclave of college buddies reassuring each other that they're brilliant. Of course there are many superb movies about making movies, for example Sunset Boulevard and the '54 remake of A Star is Born, but these films have interesting stories to tell about, and by, people who have lived, and lived somewhere other than film school. Loss of Sexual Innocence does not.

Normally I would applaud the freehand style the director uses in going back and forth between different times in the life of Julian, the main character, but some of his choices in doing so are confusing. When we first meet Julian he is a towheaded five-year-old living in Kenya; in his later youth scenes he appears as a dark-haired, obese teen, and as an adult he is rail-thin and prematurely gray. Morbid obesity is a deeply-affecting, emotionally scarring and virtually incurable condition (the "cure" rate is two percent, literally half the chance of leading an arguably normal life as has a heroin addict). The fact that Figgis, the author/director, simply wrote 100 pounds out of the story and reintroduced the character as a thin adult is a cold betrayal of the writer's lack of emotional depth or knowledge of the human condition. We're being told the life story of a character by a writer who doesn't know as much about life as we do. The changing hair color could be explained -- it really does happen to people -- but it hinders the audience who's trying to decide if these three actors are the same character, or if they are separate characters unknown to each other. Another issue that is not addressed throughout the film is, are we still in Kenya? If these nondescript urban and suburban scenes are in fact a foreign country by virtue of a caption at the bottom of the screen that says Kenya, then what is the point of setting the scenes in a faraway country?

Eventually (but don't hold your breath) Julian's story vignettes, plus those of some other characters, converge in a single plot wherein they go off to some location to make their film, but the trip results in some very physical repercussions among both central and ancillary characters. Now that the film, at this point, has condescended to tell a traditional story, we never do find out if the injured people recover.

I'm reminded of a couple of the later films of Joseph Losey (Dark Ceremony; The Go-Between), who teased us by meting out small bits of the story here and there and not telling us everything, apparently never realizing himself that he didn't have that much to say.

One final observation: The use of the word "sexual" in the title and the appearance of naked people on the poster artwork are apparently designed to draw crowds by implying, by virtue of the film's title somehow relating this story to sexuality, that the film is therefore sexy.

Don't be fooled.

The title is a bit wrong. It should have simply been The Loss Of innocence, as there was not always something sexual involved.

It was a strange movie - an art film with absolutely beautiful music and charming scenery - but, it would definitely not be for everybody.

I am really not a fan of non-liner stories. This one showed the director (Julian Sands) as age 6, 16, and currently. It jumped back and forth and had some really strange camera work at certain points that was very distracting.

There was a lot of symbolism to interpret. I am sure that not everyone could understand the loss of innocence as two twins (the gorgeous Saffron Burrows) gaze upon each other for the first time.

In the middle of the three stories was an unrelated story of Adam and Eve (Hanne Klintoe fully naked in her only film appearance). Watching them romp through the Garden of Eden until they ate the forbidden fruit (at least it was figs instead of an apple) and discover sex was a welcome distraction. It was funny as they innocently explored each other's bodies.

I tuned in to see Kelly Macdonald (Trainspotting). I was satisfied with that, but not with the movie overall.

Nic is 5 year old in 1953 Kenya. Later, he attends an all-boys school in England. Nic (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) catches his drunken girlfriend Susan (Kelly Macdonald) making out at a funeral. Gina McKee and Bernard Hill play her parents. Adult Nic (Julian Sands) drive his wife (Johanna Torell) and son to a country house. There is a black man Adam and a white girl Eve with a white horse. Another story follows Saffron Burrows as separated English and Italian twins running into each other at the airport. The Italian one is picked up by Nic. They and others go off to the Sahara desert.

Writer/director Mike Figgis delivers a disjointed, disconnected story. There is a connection that almost makes sense but never truly delivers any powerful point. It tries to be this big idea starting with the title but ends up with nothing more than a muddled experimental art-house film. It is never emotionally connected. All of the effort is stuck trying to understand the lack of flow.

The only thing that makes this painstakingly slow and utterly incomprehensible movie possible to finish in one go is the soundtrack. Otherwise, it's pretty much a typically European pretentious mess.

Absolutely nothing connects to anything, at least not in a reasonable, valid or sufficient manner. Many characters, about which we find out almost nothing, are supposedly connected - but only the director knows how (and even that's questionable, since he was obviously on drugs).

The dialogues are as scarce as I've seen anywhere before: this certainly doesn't help in clarifying things. The scenes with the black man and white woman playing Adam and Eve (so PC), and their subsequent exile from Eden by police with helicopters is straight out of Monty Python, except that this is a deadly serious pretentious drama and not a spoof.

Is there anyone who can watch that scene in which Adam and Eve urinate (we are actually shown the urine leaving the top of his penis), and take that scene seriously? Most of the cast look like they walked straight out of a New York fashion show, and this cheapens the look of the movie substantially. Lars von Trier and his 95-ers must love this garbage.

This movie is a strange one. It is difficult to work out the meaning the film maker is trying to convey. The story is very disjointed, you don't know who is who or more importantly what they are doing and why they are there. There movie flicks between totally different scenes which for me had no link whatsoever. I think the message trying to be delivered was totally obscure and I for one couldn't work it out. It seemed to be too "artsy". Perhaps the maker should next time try to project their message in a more straight forward way so normal people can understand.

Mike Figgis is an innovative director. This film was made before his other, more daring movie, "Timecode" in which he worked with a split screen in which the action could be seen happening at all times in all four sections. This film is also full of symbolism that will elude viewers. We don't think the director wanted to lose, no pun intended, the audience.

The action in this film is seen through the eyes of Nic at different stages of his life. As the movie opens, he appears in the form of a child Nic and he makes another visit at the end of the movie, perhaps to watch our reaction. The child has intelligent eyes; he appears to be looking at our soul, or perhaps he is telling us this was his own story. The film that doesn't follow a linear narrative.

Mr. Figgis composed the incidental music. He also includes well known piano pieces from composers like Beethoven and Chopin that plays well with the images on the screen. The real coup of the director was to employ Benoit Delhomme as the cinematographer of this droll story that follows Vic from childhood. Mr. Delhomme photographs the natural locations with such care that it might prove a distraction for the viewer.

Some interesting actors were engaged to give life to this sophisticated look about the loss of innocence. This is a sensual movie that relies on the openness in which the director wanted to show. Julian Sands is Vic, the young boy of the story, now an adult and a film director. Saffron Burrows is seen in a double role; she is a ravishing woman! Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays Vic as a young man. Kelly MacDonald is seen as Susan. Hanne Klintoe and Femi Ogumbanjo are seen as Adam and Eve as they are placed on the garden of eden and when they are thrown out from it after having taste the forbidden fruit. John Cowey is Vic as a child in a non speaking but highly effective part. Rosie DePalma, a Spanish actress with an amazing face, is seen as a blind woman in a riveting scene.

Like it or not, Mike Figgis is not a director to dismiss easily because he is an original.

Films like this are the reason that independent film often gets such a bad rap. It's a messy, sloppy series of images which have very little relationship with each other, slapped together with some "biblical imagery" which is about as subtle as getting shot from point blank range with a shotgun, and with some of the most obnoxious, pretentious classical piano music lathered all over the top of everything.

The allegory is heavier than a copy of "A short guide to the Australian Taxation system", but despite the woeful film-making, this might have been tolerable if it weren't for acting. Not that I blame most of the actors, who don't seem to really want to be there, for the depths this movie plummets to, but when there's only about ten minutes of dialogue, you need to do better than a vaguely disinterested performance to make something of a film. As it is, the performances mean that it's very difficult to draw any links between the characters, or anything at all that's going on. This reduces the film to a series of disconnected scenes and shots, which will leave most viewers wondering what exactly is supposed to be going on.

I'm not even going to go into the pervasive nudity and the like, which has seemingly been added simply for the sake of having some pervasive nudity in the film. I'm no fundamentalist wowser, but if you're going to do things like that, please at least have a point to it.

Essentially though, this film is pretentious art for the sake of making a pretentious art film. This does not translate into a film that is worth watching at all. Avoid.

At what point do we lose our innocence? Is it the one moment of actually having sex, or is it a build up of smaller things through life that slowly take it away? This film has the effect of juxtaposing two views on the question: with Adam & Eve, we have complete innocence up to the moment of having sex ..then they are thrust out into the modern adult world and expected to somehow automatically know how to survive in it. The discovery of Sex does not give you the automatic knowledge of how to deal with all its possible consequences. Interweaved with that, Figgis puts scenes from a man's developing life. Events shown that each eat away a little bit of innocence we may not have even realized we still have. The slow disintegration of Innocence through time. The effect of both instances is numbing. The most amazing scene for me involves two twins, unaware of each other's existence (both played by Saffron Burrows), who one day cross paths with each other in an airport. The set up is stunning. This scene begs the question: if you met up with another version of yourself, a version with a different background & different formative events --would you even be recognizable to yourself? Would you be able to relate to that other you as a person? How much have the events in our lives formed us, and how much really is biological? The only quarrel with this film I have is a series of scenes in which Mr. Figgis employed a slow fade-in/fade-out method. This was very eye-painful to watch, the fade is at such a rate you feel as though you are just slow-blinking before falling asleep. Thankfully, this is only done briefly in the film. Over all, excellent filmmaking!

Fascinating, disturbing, and not at all pornographic. This is one of those movies that will make your friends wonder about you. Worth watching if you're in a thoughtful mood, it's self-consciously arty. There are a number of scenes that will stay with you for a long time. Was this really the same director as Leaving Las Vegas?

This is not a film for someone who wants to "sit back" and be mindlessly entertained. It is a challenge to watch and an even bigger challenge to decipher. However, this film is such a demonstration of where film can go (beyond a linear storyline and literal constructions). It is patient and relaxed in its pace, is free to navigate through time and place. At first glance it appears to be a random compilation of shorts, but it really is a powerful interconnection of dreams, memories, archetypes, and life. What is most admirable about this film, though, is its confidence in its imagery (some of which is extremely powerful) and its minimal dialogue. This is not a film that "spoon feeds" theme and gives us chatterbox characters to walk us through what is happening. To be honest, I have seen the film three times and still am not sure about what is happening at every point, but it does leave room for personal meaning that makes it priceless and so rich. How many films can it be said of that even after a third viewing you have not even begun to realize its full meaning? There is much more said in the silence of "Loss of Sexual Innocence" that is ever said in any of its verbose contemporaries.

I found this film much by accident, however the sexual interaction througout this film was quite intriguing. Hanne Klintoe is a looker with a very fine body. Interesting to see Ms. Macdonald, who also appeared in "Elizabeth" and "Trainspotting". And by the way, in "GosfordPark". Apparently Ms. Klintoe has not appeared in any other film, or at least, has no record of filmography. Wish I knew if she is in any other film. Incidentally, Saffron Burrows, who is murdered in this film also appears in the very fine film entitled "Enigma". A spy story about encoding messages during the 2nd world war. Enigma, like this film has many twists and turns to the plot and also enjoys some of the finest British actors of record. I enjoyed this film and posses a copy of the same.

Mike Figgis thinks he has something to say about life. He doesn't. It's that simple. A triumph of bloated, indulgent and affected style over zero substance, this film takes itself very seriously indeed. It is nothing more than a very, very long Calvin Klein commercial, and it's just chock-a-block with phony portent. I was actually embarrassed for Mr Figgis. It's painfully obvious he thought he was creating a masterpiece of art film, but his metaphors, juxtapositions, casting and editing choices were juvenile and grandiose and, therefore, ridiculous and laughable.

Possibly the worst use of Chopin to date.

And by the way, to the previous commenter from Seattle who thought they were being so smart and clever in dissing the person who used "cliched and hackneyed" in the same sentence.... actually, you shouldn't have been quite so proud of yourself. There is a distinction between the two, they are not one in the same; nor are they interchangeable.

In the Oxford English Dictionary, hackneyed is defined as "Trite, uninteresting or commonplace through familiarity or indiscriminate and frequent use." Cliche is defined as "A stereotyped expression, a hackneyed phrase or opinion, a stereotyped character, style, etc."

So you see, a cliche is a noun, a thing; hackneyed is an adjective, it's descriptive. So, one could decry the hackneyed symbolism of TLoSI while simultaneously finding its visual cliches contemptible.

Mike Figgis' "Loss of Sexual innocence" is another of his undertakings into the world of film art. It's not quite art, and it's not quite entertaining. The film is expressed in a series of vignettes concerning the sexual maturity of a character called Nic intertwined with other bits that are supposed to represent Adam and Eve and the beginnings of sexual discovery and other bits that either mean something or not. The problem, though, is that the bits don't really add up to anything, not schematically, not thematically. Every time the Nic character reappears at a different age, you don't even get a sense of it being the same person; it always feels like Figgis is starting from scratch all over again with a new set of players.

Figgis is a talented filmmaker, though. He knows how to build a segment for dramatic impact and how to compose a shot for effect, and in those rare moments, it feels like it's not all worthless and Figgis is getting across to the audience on some level. The sketch of Nic and his family stopping at a roadside gas station is a good piece, as is the woman in the see-through cotton dress at the train stop. There is an implied sexuality there, the sexuality that hums all around us, that we experience without really feeling. That's when the movie scores, when it's not just another lame coming-of-age story. But those moments are all too few. On the other hand, the Adam and Eve bits are trite, and one scene where a man carries a shopping bag with a liquor bottle spout protruding (obviously a metaphor for the male penis) is kid stuff, junkyard symbolism at its worst. Where this movie fails is not is in its structure on the screen, but in the mind.

One postscript: After watching it, I put on the director's commentary on the DVD to get maybe a better understanding of what he was trying to do. Figgis narrates with a not-exactly-arrogance but with a tone certainly descending from the mountain. When he spoke the words "we trucked in a load of red clay to recreate the Kenya of my youth", I knew I was done for. I turned it off and switched back to my Sunday Sports Center. 1 1/2 * out of 4

You are not captured to watch the movie in the first few minutes, just made confused by how the story unfolds and how it is presented to the audience. The movie jumped from story line to story line, just when you are getting interested in a part of the story, it shifts to something else. This is NOT Artful or Creative, just messy storytelling in a shoddy way! There does not seem to be one train of thought that wants to lure you into the story. Personally I would re-edit it so the story would not seem so confusing.

Now I can see why it took Mike Figgis so long to find financing for this movie. The movie was so fragmented that it was pathetic. If he hadn't done Leaving Las Vegas this movie would NEVER been made! What a waste of creativeness by a director/writer and what a waste of talent for this movie.

I think this script should have been left in a box somewhere to collect dust and fall apart!

Come on! This discussion should never have devolved into a set of arguments for or against "artistic" and "Nonlinear" filmmaking. The film is an acceptable example of neither. I saw it on DVD last night and found it unbelievably sophomoric and self-indulgent. The cinematography was cloyingly pretty and should appeal only to rabid MTV fans and greeting card photographers. The whole Adam and Eve subplot wore nothing but a trite old hat. The fact that Figgis cast that singularly vain prat Julian Sands as his past selves and put pout-on-a -stick Saffron Burrows under him should be a dead giveaway -- equivalent to putting a warning sticker on the movie: Warning: This film was made on a low budget by an impotent pre adolescent old fart to appeal to undersexed post adolescent artsy fartsies (who should know better.) Figgis's painful commentary on the DVD's extra track is a lot of jibbering on as the auteur searches vainly for something to say and is reduced to snippets of the "an actor got sick so we used my cousin bob in this scene" variety. The film works on only one level: as a graveyard for every dumb 19 year-old would-be artsy's ideas, images, politics, sexual fantasies and cheesy classical record collections.

I figured out the plot(?) out by the end of the film. As confusing as it was with me, I stuck with it until the conclusion as I did with 'Eraserhead.' It's like a difficult crossword puzzle. The film is challenging. What really kept me in it was the music (most of the classics were familiar; Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven) and the photography and imagery. Having a 50" plasma screen helped also. I saw the film on Sundance, which is now airing ads. Still, the film was not edited as is always the case on Sundance, and I appreciate that.

The late scene, which depicts a youthful Nigerian boy with a young white Nigerian (is that possible?) being chased by Nazi's with dogs is abstract, not because of nudity, but probably because Nazi's don't like to see blacks and whites naked TOGETHER. (do I really have to put Nazi's in upper case letters).

A set of confusing and never settled situations, some connected, some don't. The unpleasant long lasting black screen that I actually hate, are as often as never before in Mike Figgis movies. The editing of unrelated images/situations I never understood at all. I have loved some Mike Figgis movies ("One Night Stand", "Leaving Las Vegas", "Internal Affairs") but I think that in this one there was a loss of movie making essence, or at least I didn't get it AT ALL.

The LoSI may have been my favourite movie from 1999. To help set the scene for that comment, my favourite movie from 1998 may have been The Thin Red Line. It seems that movies that I love generally split the audience into two groups. Those that lose interest or are disgusted, and those that find these manifestations of the possibilities offered by film making exciting.

I enjoy films that are told through cliche as much as the next person. High production values, non-innovative camera work, predictable characterizations (even within complex plot lines) are fun. But I also like to see the breadth of cinema challenged. Occasionally, films are able to appeal to both the audiences that want familiar story telling methods, and those that want to be challenged. It's great when that happens, but both the LoSI and the TRL have failed to do this for a significant portion of the audience (blue vs red America?).

Some of the best parts of LoSI have to do with capturing moments that distill those things that we share. For example, the fumbling teenage living room scene hit some parts of the give and take of early sexual experience perfectly. A frustrated car ride captures family dyamics, and the everyday moments of getting along/by better than any other film I've seen. A distant viewing of domesticity (including putting a child to bed and love making over chopped vegetables) through a window precisely underscore more cliches of everyday living that are cliches because they happen to us. Perhaps because these scenes don't inform a simple story narrative, they fail to hold the interest of those looking for escape FROM life (again, as everyday lived). But I'm not looking for that. I'm looking for a celebration of identity, and those things that create it, and I am willing to work my way through what is, I think, essentially a character piece.

This movie does, I think, a very good job of giving us, in two hours, a short examination of the develpment of one character's sexuality. How that development is a loss of sexual innocence, and how this loss ties in to larger ideas in our society (adam and eve), is something that I have both an academic (reflective) and an aesthetic (less relfective) interest in. As such, this movie appeals to me.

It won't appeal to everyone. I think that a good way to judge whether you should see this movie or not is if you _LOVED_ Saving Private Ryan and _HATED_ The Thin Red Line. If so, do NOT see this movie. If you liked both, or liked only the thin red line, you'll probably be more interested in watch LoSI.

The audience probably splits similarly in regards to the Figgis Filmography. Much of his early (mass market) work appeals to the first set (but not exclusively). His later work, the second (exclusively).

When I write film reviews, I almost never give movies a score of 1, no matter how badly I hated it, unless it is completely incomprehensible on any level, generally a movie that literally has no discernible plot (unless it is a film that is meant to have no plot). There's a ridiculous horror movie called Nightmare Weekend, for example, that deserves a 1 for that exact reason. All three Scary Movies deserved a vote of 1, if even that high, even though they had clear plots. Those are in a curious group of movies that are so bad they deserve special recognition.

With The Loss of Sexual Innocence, you have a movie that has no plot but whose style and philosophical depth gives it the right not to have one. It's a weird movie that is strung together like a lot of completely unrelated scenes one after the other, but it plays like a series of dreams that come together at the end and then meaning kind of hits you. It's notable that so much of the movie seems meaningless and random and yet at the end of the movie the message is so powerful that it's amazing that you hadn't caught on already.

I don't pretend to understand everything that the movie is trying to say, but if nothing else the movie is stunningly photographed. Even the uncomfortable and ugly scenes are cleverly shot. Consider, for example, the various 'Scenes from Nature." All of them are very short and wordless and contain something like a naked person emerging from a still pond, walking up the bank, and looking around, but they are some of the most beautiful shots in the movie, and not just because of the nudity, obviously, since the nudity is total and yet none of the scenes are even remotely sexy. They clearly represent a time of total sexual innocence, since they are so clearly meant to signify some type of Adam and Eve scenario. In the third scene from nature, there is a black man and a white woman walking down to the still pond that the first two scenes from nature showed them emerging from, and after catching a fish and having no idea what to do with it, they marvel at their urination function and the differences between their bodies.

From there we cut back to the present, where the rest of the movie takes place, and watch a series of people acting not nearly as sexually innocent as that man and woman were. A little more than halfway through the movie we see the woman wandering through the garden, I guess you could call it, and she comes across a statue of Jesus on the cross and then a rusted out automobile. She's fascinated by it, and then she goes around and starts eating things off of the trees which, if I know anything about the Garden of Eden, is some pretty reckless behavior. Ultimately she and the man eat off of the trees until they make themselves sick. When they wake up after being down with the sickness, their innocence has been lost, they see each other and the world differently than before, and they ultimately manage to get themselves kicked out of the Garden.

The movie cuts back and forth between modern times and this sort of ancient Garden of Eden setting, interestingly showing innocence lost in both of them in a way in which they kind of meet up at the end, and one of the characters turns out to be the filmmaker making a documentary of it all along the way. There is a powerful scene near the end of the film in which the filmmaker and his crew are traveling across a desert and, after getting into an argument about an interesting thing that they hear on the radio, they hit and kill a young boy from a tribe of blue people who evidently live in the desert. The first thing that struck me about this scene is not that it showed how this filmmaker and his crew had long since lost their innocence, but how it turned out that they were not the only ones. The movie is not about how any certain people have lost their sexual innocence or any other kind of innocence, it's about how the entire human race has lost their innocence.

Oh and here's some advice, watch the movie with the subtitles on, because it switches back and forth between various languages and is also recorded so quietly that many times you can't hear what people are saying even when they're speaking English.

This movie tries WAY too hard to be artistic. the story is imbedded underneath so much confusion and symbology that its hard to tell what the director is trying to say.

its as if the writers took 50 scenes and threw them into the air, and picked them up randomly, and that was the movie. the scenes look as if the editors didnt know how to cut a scene.

nothing happens. dont waste your time. this is a 1/10 movie. the director is NOT an artist, but he definately wants to be one. he failed. he should not make any more movies. the end

This is a true "art" film, it has great depth and insight, but doesn't give the viewer a clear story-line to follow or any help at all such as side comments or scene setters. The film is a virtual feast of expert filmmaking in all its facets, especially the fine framing of the scenes, truly natural acting and sound work second to none. How many filmmakers could make a short scene in a plane and the subsequent landing on the runway a filmic event of such beauty it will be long remembered.

I think this film is one not to be missed

Not having seen "Leaving Las Vegas" (or any of his other films), I had no idea who Mike Figgis was. After seeing this movie, I don't think I ever want to hear of him again.

I suspect Figgis is a Fellini or Kubrick wannabe. Lucky for both of them that they died before this film was released and didn't have to sit through this rubbish.

I have nothing against 'Art' movies, or movies with minimal dialogue, or movies that develop in a non-linear fashion, but as these sort of movies go, this is a dud. It has lush scenery, great cinematography and features beautiful music from composers like Chopin and Beethoven, but overall the movie is so completely mind-numbingly BORING! (Thank goodness it was on cable and I didn't PAY to see it!)

I sat through the full 106 minutes of this film, just to see if in fact there was any point to it at all. Nope, afraid not. It's simply symbolistic tripe assembled with over-the-top editing.

Despite having said all that, I will say that I thought the scene at the airport where the two twins encounter each other was very well done. Unfortunately, that one scene is not enough to make up for the time I lost, when I could have been doing something more exciting - like watching the grass grow!

I do not understand how one can call this a bad movie. I like it from the first up to the last scene. Beautiful pictures. Sensual narrated by a very talented director. I guess you have to be a sensual human being to feel sympathy for this movie. I feel lucky that i do.