Henry & June
by Philip Kaufman
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Actor: Fred Ward, Kevin Spacey, Maria de Medeiros, Richard E. Grant, Uma ThurmanDirector: Philip Kaufman
Brand: Universal Studios
Cinematographer: Philippe Rousselot
Writer: Philip Kaufman
Editor: Dede Allen
Producer: Peter Kaufman
Producer: Yannoulla Wakefield
Writer: Anaïs Nin
Writer: Rose Kaufman
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 136 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-02-23
Audience Rating: NC-17
Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Reviews of Henry & June
DVD Review: A TRULY GREAT PERFORMANCE: UMA THURMON
Summary: 4 Stars
I don't intend to burden either of us with my ideas about Anias Nin or Henry Miller's art and methods, or their lives together, or their careeers. I went through my Sex-As-Personal-Liberation phase several decades ago, read their work, and my opinion of their efforts, in particular, both carnal and literary, are not enthusiastic. However, this film is a good one in that it is very nearly a "You Are There" recreation of Paris Between the Two Wars, and that in itself is worthwhile. Lots of time-specific nuggets of the real stuff, including snatches of "J'ai deux amours" in the earliest recorded version, with Jo Baker's unmistakable voice, street songs and carnival behavior, as well as little montage-like glimpses of Man Ray and his photographs. The exteriors of buildings, streets and courtyards of The Quarter are shown (not much changed even now) as well as the cramped, medieval interiors; but not a glimpse of the terrifying interior plumbing. For that you'll have to see Bill Murray's THE RAZOR'S EDGE, another great literary/historical recreation, though fictional.
But as good an historical recreatin of an eara as this movie is, with an exceptionally interesting actress Maria di Madiernos playing Anias Nin, and even our Kevin Spacey somewhere in the mix, nothing is evenly remotely as interesting as Uma Thurman's incredible tour de force as June, Miller's ex-taxi-dance hall wife and emotional and financial support during the lean years of his early career. As an actress on film, Thurman is always at least interesting to look at, for as Merle Streep said of her, "She is six foot tall, extremely beautiful and supremely talented." She is so secure in her sexuality, she is comfortable in homosexual and heterosexual roles. She is alternately graceful and powerful, as needed, whenever and however called for, and can summon up emotional power in whatever amount and whichever degree as may be required. We can take that for granted whenever we pay to look at one of her films. Here, in HENRY AND JUNE however, she demonstrates something I was completely unprepared for; her vocal abilities and in particular, her use of diction. Understand; HENRY AND JUNE is filmed in English, with only tiny snippets of French, as needed. What struck or didn't strike me, at first, is that Uma plays her role speaking in the flat, uninflected Brooklynese of the original woman throughout, without the tiniest lapse. (I mistook it for bad acting, or laziness.) But watching and listening more carefully, it came to me that in order to catch the poignance of Clara Bow's performances, I had to imagine Clara's own Brooklyn, working-class voice. Uma played June as sounding, and therefore being, or appearing, utterly COMMON. Utterly American. That is the key to her sexual appeal, and it is the key to Nin's fascination with her. Nin's view of her, of Henry and their literary efforts, is an aristocrat's view, and her erotic interest in June, is tied to her condesention. (Nin's Diary is all about slumming.) June is the new, independent and unencumbered woman, with her own erotic and emotional destiny, and Nin wants to become that woman.
The urgency of sex in the face of doom: This tiny aspect of the story characterizes most of it (most of Henry and Anias' copulative drama) as well as most of the turmoil of the age, in Europe. It is no secret that Orwell, working in the same Parisian neighborhood, was writing exactly contemporaneously and that Nin, Miller and Orwell were primarily self-obsessed diarists. Proust was alive and working too, as well as Gide, yet another diarist. Their Paris was exactly what you'd expect in a culture on the verge of suicide, in which more than half the male population of the leading European nations died on the battlefields of WW I. Naturally the brothels were filled with poor, lonely young women with no possible way of making a living or of making family. With European social presumptions about personal behavior in ruins, unsecure men and women fornicated in the streets, or wherever impulse found them. And the "American Girl" of the Cinema, who turns up as a character in Satie's ballet PARADE, became a kind of an erotic archtype. Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks and others, typified a kind of "cheap" new and easily available sensuality that seemed to be inevitable; something akin to Chanel's #5, the first popular synthetic female essence, or her inimitable, all-purpose "Little Black Dress" which was her version of Henry Ford's Model T. Somehow, Thurmon apparently managed to absorb everything the characters and their circumstances offered, and to embody it on screen, and miraculously she is able to transform and then display it as the original character might have done, with seeming effortlessness.
This may not be the performance of her lifetime, but for students of film, this may be the performance of our lifetime. Quelle artiste!
Description of Henry & June
HENRY & JUNE - DVD MovieAnaïs Nin (Maria de Medeiros) is a young woman in 1930s Paris whose husband is slowly defecting from art to working in a bank, leaving her very bored. When the then-unpublished Brooklyn writer Henry Miller (Fred Ward) enters her life, she embarks on a journey of seduction and sexual exploration that eventually leads from the writer to his wife, June (Uma Thurman), who finances her husband's life in Paris so he may praise her beauty in his writing. Unhappy with her husband's writing and her lovers' affair, June enters a jealous rage, forcing Henry into suffering-artist mode and Nin back to her husband. Despite having one of the more erotic scenes of the 1990s, between Nin and June, the film does not live up to its subject, largely due to a mediocre screenplay and flawed direction. The strength of the original material and Medeiros's decidedly unflawed performance, however, make it worth viewing. --James McGrath
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