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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Mike Figgis' stylistically extreme sexual autobiography may be a failure, but at least it fails shamelessly.
May 28, 1999 | Starting with its title -- which sounds both titillating and pompous -- "The Loss of Sexual Innocence" is the sort of indulgent movie that invites derision. But Mike Figgis' wildly reckless movie isn't dismissible. "The Loss of Sexual Innocence" is a failure to be sure, but if it's not exactly a brave one, it's one whose foolhardiness deserves at least half a salute. I don't want to set up false analogies between mainstream movies and non-mainstream movies, between art and entertainment. But in a movie atmosphere dominated by the crushing irrelevancy of "The Phantom Menace," Figgis' insistence on making such a personal movie, bad choices and all, clears your head.
It's risky enough that Figgis is attempting to tell a sort of sexual autobiography in a fractured, impressionistic structure. But that's not enough for him. And so he loosely parallels the story of Nic, a documentary filmmaker whom we see at 5, 12, 16 and as an adult, with the myth of a black Adam (Femi Ogumbanjo) and a white Eve (Hanne Klintoe).
Since his first feature, 1987's "Stormy Monday," Figgis has been one of the most interesting -- as well as one of the most wildly uneven and frustrating -- filmmakers to emerge from Europe. He can do "straightforward" moviemaking. His 1993 version of Terrence Rattigan's "The Browning Version" was the sort of polished and moving version of a classic that Merchant-Ivory's snoozefests are supposed to be and almost never are. But Figgis has a taste for the experimental, which in his films is sometimes inseparable from the merely stylish. At his most out-there, as in the 1990 "Liebestraum," he's nothing but style. But even in "Stormy Monday" or "Leaving Las Vegas" there are moments when Figgis is willing to let a combination of music and camera effects -- in "Leaving Las Vegas," he reduced that city's skyline to blurred, limned bars of color while sax-heavy renditions of standards played on the soundtrack -- take the place of acting and writing. It's extraordinarily effective, yet it also comes close to being mood music.
Still, those moods can be damned hard to shake, and Figgis is tuned into a fatalistic, doomed romanticism that can get under your skin and stay there. (Watching "Stormy Monday" is a pleasure akin to spending an evening sunk in an armchair sipping Scotch, smoking and listening to Lee Wiley records.) For Figgis, who in an interview in the current Sight and Sound talks about being bored with the conventional narrative structure of movies, the interplay of music and image probably amounts to an attempt to capture what's sometimes called "pure cinema." I believe there is such a thing. But, paradoxically, the moments I've encountered it have always been grounded in the nuts and bolts of narrative and character -- the wobbling bowling pin that signifies death in Howard Hawks' "Scarface"; the scene in the record-store listening booth in "Before Sunrise" when you know Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have fallen in love simply by the way they avoid looking at each other. They are moments when only moving images seem capable of capturing the emotions and interactions of the moments so concisely or profoundly. The trouble with most directors who go chasing after pure cinema is that they think they can find it by freeing themselves from the nuts and bolts, and that's part of the problem Figgis faces here.
What's best about "The Loss of Sexual Innocence" is how the various episodes capture the texture and weight of Nic's experience. But every one of its best moments would be richer if it were grounded in a fully developed narrative. Many of Figgis' instincts are sharp. He doesn't put a rosy glow around burgeoning sexuality. By linking it constantly with death and violence, he calls up the stomach-churning mixture of nausea and excitement our first brushes with either of those experiences can provoke. The sight of 5-year-old Nic (John Cowey) spying an old man fetishistically appraising a teenage Kenyan girl kitted out in lingerie too big for her provokes the same uncomprehending fascination (and perhaps fear) in Nic as when he sees blood still dripping from the ear of a factory worker's corpse. As moments like this come back to the grown Nic (Julian Sands, doing his damnedest to flesh out Figgis' conception of the role), Figgis conveys how shameful or frightening moments from your past can suddenly overcome you, can still seem startlingly raw.
