Eros

I saw this movie at the Toronto Film Festival, on the suggestion of friends who were very excited about Wong Kar Wai's short in particular. I had never seen anything by that director, but I was interested enough in the concept of the movie (three short films by three directors of different nationality) to go along.

The first short, Wong's 'The Hand', is excellent; it is touching and powerful. The acting is so good that the sub-titles are barely necessary; the emotion in their voices conveys meaning in itself. I enjoyed this enough to want to see more of the director's work.

The second is Steven Soderbergh's 'Equilibrium', and it's the sort of film that I sometimes think the West has forgotten how to make. It's a funny, fast-paced bit of banter between two excellent actors (Alan Arkin and Robert Downey Jr.), both of whose professional lives are thrown off balance by women. Also, despite its short running time,it manages to stick in a number of amusing plot twists.

Which brings us to the third short, Michaelangelo Antonini's 'The Dangerous Thread of Things'. As my friend put it: "Like so many directors, he got old and he got horny". This is a shocking combination of bad acting, pointless storytelling, and unnecessary nudity...and this is not just my opinion; by about halfway through, most of the audience was laughing with embarrassment and more than a few were leaving the theatre.

So, in conclusion, Eros is a film of contrasts: two excellent pieces of cinema and one piece of garbage. If you like the work of Wong or Soderbergh, I highly recommend this film. If you are an Antonini fan, stay away...it'll just upset you.

"Eros" (2004) is the collection of three short films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (segment "Il filo pericoloso delle cose"), Steven Soderbergh (segment "Equilibrium") , and Kar Wai Wong (segment "The Hand"). Each film explores the always exiting and mysterious subjects of love, sexuality, and desire.

My favorite is "The Hand" – a sensual, emotional, powerful and very sad story about a young tailor who put the years of unrequited love for a beautiful call girl in an exquisite dress he created for her. He knew the exact measurements from touch. This segment is so great that I am ready to buy a DVD just to be able to see it often. It is a brilliant work of art from one of the greatest working directors now.

Steven Soderbergh's "Equilibrium" is a funny duet between two excellent actors, Alan Arkin as a voyeuristic shrink and Robert Downey Jr. as his patient who has a reoccurring dream about a beautiful woman.

Michelangelo Antonioni's segment "Il filo pericoloso delle cose" aka "The Dangerous Thread of Things" has been called the weakest in the trio. Many posters call it garbage, the total waste of time, the soft –porn made by a man who "got old and got horny". I personally did not find it a waste of time and if the man at 92 wants to make a little film that celebrates beauty and femininity – so be it. I feel that Michelangelo's segment is much deeper than it seems - even on the surface it is very attractive to look at.

The initial concept for making this film was to offer three variations on the theme of love from three directors from three cultures. Or is the title 'Eros' more about the erotic than about love? Question unanswered by this triptych of minor works by some superb directors. The end result seems to be three streams of conscious thoughts looking for a reason to make it to the screen. With the brilliance of the three directors one would expect far more than the film delivers.

Wong Kar Wai presents the strongest of the three films in a dark story about a tailor who sublimates his desire for a courtesan (Gong Li) by making clothes for her - a 'servant' who finally reverses his role. The photography and interweaving of the characters is very beautiful to experience.

Steven Soderberg makes a testy little script about an ad man (Robert Downey, Jr) in therapy with a bizarre psychiatrist (Alan Arkin) exploring a recurring sensual dream. Shot is black and white the actors give it their all but the story is silly and becomes boring with all the distractions Soderberg works into the weak plot.

Antonioni attempts to breathe life into the old Italian movies of lover's spats and diversions and comes up with what feels like a script-less little mess of a movie bent solely on see-through blouses and nude cavorting on beaches.

As a triptych the film just doesn't become airborne, despite some very high powered, first rate directors. Much ado about very little. Grady Harp

This is one of the most encompassing films I have seen in a while. Not because we have a chance to savor at once three masters at work, no. Opinions of their mastery will differ after all.

It matters because we have three master fiddlers on the same stage, liberated from the pressure of exerting control over the logistics of an entire project, so each one can singularly shape his present moment from his corner of the stage, a small rhythm, trusting the others to compliment and intone. So even though each segment is structured within itself and harmonical, the whole echoes with the assymetry of spontaneous creation. Wonderful.

So three shorts about eros; albeit not erotic in the sense perhaps inferred by the title, not strictly sensual, rather about the desire to see in that space where the senses come into being. All three are highly architectural essays about that space. All three are about some ineffable palpitation of the heart growing fonder, beating faster. All three improvise transcendence.

The structure of the thing we can attribute to our conventional film culture that always waxes vaguely about the abstract (Antonioni), treats narrative engineering as a subject of dry, academic discourse (Soderbergh), and is generally more comfortable to evaluate memories of beauty and touch (Wong Kar Wai).

I am going to write about these last to first, which is also how they resonated with me.

• The last segment is typical Kar Wai/Doyle fashion, unfolding down the corner from In the Mood for Love; so flowery, arrested breathing, quietly exasperated romance with the musky scents of intimacy in close quarters. Of course Mood only blossomed in hindsight of 2046, and there is no chance for that here. So we get a simple beauty about a simple yearning; a young tailor falls for an elegant woman, both strangers. He measures love for her as the silky fabrics he creates to encase her. She constantly eludes him. All that is finally left is a moment suspended in time. It's okay but the least here for my taste, a matter of some poetry.

• Soderbergh for the middle part. Free from the eyes of Hollywood money-men, he creates what he does best and has repeatedly nested in his more famous stuff; New Wave from the gaps of multiple planes of seeing. A man is recounting to his psychiatrist a recurring dream about a woman, who unseen by his patient all this time keeps looking out the window with a pair of binoculars. The whole thing is set in the 50's and aptly recalls film noir as a shorthand, there are venetian blinds, hats, shadows. Most importantly noirish, a double perspective looking to apprehend the controls of nightmare (or dream as in our case).

The update, a French touch: a third layer at the last moment, the base layer of reality last. Piled on that we have the dream about the woman, purely sensual blues, and the mind inbetween, the Rear Window vignette with the psychiatrist, seeking the mechanisms that control these images. He finds inspiration in the dream to apply in real life, a new motto for an alarm clock, and comes to realize who is the elusive woman. Wonderful, structured stuff.

• Finally going backwards we have Antonioni on his last work, the one master two or three notches above the rest and again wildly misunderstood. Several viewers have commented that his segment is little more than the sexual fantasies of a dirty old man. What narrow-minded bunk. What poor reading skills. To even think that Antonioni would have to grow to be 90 to peek at pert nipples. Oh, there is a shot of a woman standing up on a bed fondling her privates, and more nudity; but it's a fantasy only if you completely miss the shot immediately after that posits the whole structure of the house as this woman of mysterious architecture.

No, what we have here is another contemplation on the cessation of self from Antonioni's large contemplative tradition.

You may have noticed that he all but disappeared after The Passenger. There was the stroke and all that. But beyond that, there was nowhere left to go. He had achieved the utmost that film can aspire to be to my mind; sensing in the present purely with the eye, a full awareness of the world as it comes into being and vanishes again. There is nothing more.

So for his part, he films one last time for old time's sake. He takes us on a reminiscing tour of earlier films as though saying goodbye to the whole thing soon to vanish; a couple wandering the ruins of an affair breaking down (L'Avventura, La Notte), youth bathing naked between rocks (Zabriskie Point), the towering old house (a monastery in L'Avventura, where bells were rung), the sense of a concave reality (Blowup).

So the man takes off to explore this other woman, new sex with her that could rejuvenate a life of exasperation. Of course simply pursuing blind new desire is not the answer, so he disappears from the film. The two women meet on an empty stretch of beach.

Antonioni being the wisest of the three, is the only one who leaves us with something tangible to attain. Film doesn't have to be highly complex to be insightful. It can be a simple passage, no more than a woman dancing naked on a beach. The parting shot sums an entire life in movies, a sage's life. The two women standing next to each other, a little apart, not touching, but aware in each other's presence and their shadows connect. It's the most sublime last shot any filmmaker graced us with.

-Kar Wai, segment The Hand: 5/10. -Soderbergh, segment Equilibrium: 8/10. -Antonioni, segment The Dangerous Thread of Things: 10/10

I rather enjoy watching short films. Like short stories, there's seldom room for more than one good idea, so that idea has to be done well--in the hands of a skilled director, this is an opportunity rather than a limitation. Eros is a collection of three such films, ostensibly sharing a similar theme.

Wong Kar Wai's "The Hand" is the first film, and is a premiere example of what a short film can achieve. A concise story about a tailor and a high class prostitute, "The Hand" distills the love/lust theme into a beautiful, intoxicating gem. It is by far the best film of the bunch, perhaps even one of the director's finest.

Steven Soderbergh's "Equilibrium" is the second film in the trio, and features a few shots of a naked woman and a long and unrelated dialog between Robert Downey Jr and Alan Arkin. As far as I can tell the film has vanishing little to do with love, lust, passion or sex--and not much else to say about anything. Soderbergh, who's often hit-or-miss, misses big time with this convoluted short.

Michelangelo Antonioni's "Dangerous thread" (or however it is properly translated) is quite different from the previous two films. It is certainly on message, featuring lots of full frontal nudity and some sex, but doesn't really have much of a story. It actually feels like it is much closer to succeeding than "Equilibrium", if only because it seems to fit comfortably within its time constraints, but the vacuous plot leaves you bored.

In the end Eros is a missed opportunity. After the first film you expect a beautiful tapestry of ideas and perspectives, but it never materializes. Nevertheless, the first film is well worth watching--easily justifying a rental or screening.