The Loss of Sexual Innocence

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

really really really really bad... not to mention long and boring...a shocker... I don't know what Mike Figgis was thinking about when he thought to do this one

I don't recommend this to anyone...give it a miss

Oh my, what a piece of c***. This movie feels like something a freshman in film school would do when he was trying to be "artsy." The Adam and Eve thing was so cliche. I didn't learn anything from this film. There were no new insights into life, or new ways of looking at things. Through the most basic symbolism (that a college kid would be embarrassed to use) the director tries to say something about sex I guess. The film was shot beautifully, but so what. Britney Spears albums are recorded beautifully by talented producers but the music underneath still sucks, and that's what happened here. Figgis would be a great cinematographer, that's about it. He really does do some inventive and passionate work visually, unfortunately, the rest of the movie is total garbage and you need MORE than just visuals to make a quality film. His story ideas are hackneyed and cliche.

He tries to tie together different times of a man's life, yet he uses a blond haired, big-headed kid as a young child; a fat brown haired kid as a pre-teen; and then a blond stick-thin man as an adult. If you are going to show different stages of someone's life, especially not in sequence, you should at least have the actors bear some minimal resemblance to each other. Don't tell me this movie is sooo abstract that you can have totally physically differing looking actors playing the same person. I can't fathom how or why they would do this. Totally ridiculous casting.

By the way, Why is Eve a thin white woman and Adam a strapping black man (who looks like there must have been a solo-flex in Eden)? There was absolutely no point in those scenes. Oooh, I get it, a snake. At one point I thought the whole movie was just one long Diesel Jeans commercial--all pretension with no substance. I have no problem with non-linear film, in fact I have loved some and gotten a lot out of them, but this movie manages to at once be incredibly obvious and predictable and at the same time totally incongruent and non-sensual.

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.

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.