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Julian Sands and Johanna Torrel in The Loss of
Sexual Innocence
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The sensation of shutting my eyes came fast. The auditorium turned dark. The flickering image onscreen followed a lone car winding its way along a ribbon of highway in Northern England. I was numbed by its stark beauty. A simple scene of domestic angst -- a filmmaker named Nic (Julian Sands), his wife (Johanna Torrel) and young son (Geraint Ellis) -- en route to a country house. To his wife's dismay, Nic allows his work to intrude on their getaway. A moment of kitchenside passion turns clumsy and brutish. Whatever feelings are left between them has already turned sour.
Watch The Loss of Sexual Innocence, and it's immediately clear that British filmmaker Mike Figgis remains as adventuresome as ever. Moist with exaggerated colors and otherworldly imagery, Figgis' new film creates a dreamlike sense of wonder. The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a beguiling sight to behold.
Behind its slick veneer is where the trouble begins. Dramatically inspired by the story of Adam and Eve, Figgis creates a biblical series of stories in Italy, England and Tunisia that follow Nic's life from a chubby Brit teen to a muscular movie producer. The film's interweaving interpretation of Genesis only fragments the film's core story to the point of incoherence. By the time danger strikes Nic and a beautiful colleague (Saffron Burrows) in the Tunisian desert, The Loss of Sexual Innocence has dissolved into moviemade artifice. It is a forgettable dream at best.
Yet there is a love/hate conundrum surrounding The Loss of Sexual Innocence. Here is a moviemade rarity: an experimental film with a legitimate theatrical release. In the vast expanse of commercial cinema, watching the same formulas played and replayed again, I can't help but become enthused by any film that tries something different. Of course, "change" itself is never enough to support an entire movie. The luster of The Loss of Sexual Innocence's dazzling vision quickly fades. What's left is a disjointed tale lacking in compelling characters and dramatic suspense. Maybe The Loss of Sexual Innocence settles into its dream state too much for its own good. By the time its closing credits scroll across the screen, one is left trying to decipher what little can be remembered about the movie.
Much of the film's beauty is overwhelming, a lush collection of landscapes shot by director of photography Benoít Delhomme. It's a 16mm work of art (the film was later blown up to 35mm for its release). If Figgis' intent was to make a nature travelogue, The Loss of Sexual Innocence would have been a grand success. The climactic sequence alone -- a confrontation between Nic's film crew and nomadic locals, where the Tunisian sun warps the dark blue skin and blue robes of a desert tribe -- remains a feverish image. It is a closing jolt of nightmarish drama, a bold reminder of how little content occupies the rest of the film.
For a filmmaker whose reputation has been built on tales about love and pain, The Loss of Sexual Innocence appears to be the pinnacle of Figgis' storytelling obsession. What little drama is able to poke its way through the non-linear plotting feels overwrought. Few films are as emotionally insufferable.
The watery emergence of the waifish Eve becomes the film's clunkiest allegory. Paired with a hunkish, black Adam, Figgis jolts the biblically inspired fall from grace with racial exotica. Yet, like much of the film, only the striking visuals make any impact. Even a modern update that puts the two innocents face-to-face with an army of paparazzi adds little to the film.
I have no problem with the fact that The Loss of Sexual Innocence shuns dialogue for visual storytelling. It was what I liked so much about Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged. In fact, Figgis' strength as a filmmaker has been his reputation for short scripts. The Loss of Sexual Innocence doesn't need more words. It does suffer from a lack of emotional substance that would have made more sense out of its dreamlike story.
Watching The Loss of Sexual Innocence makes one nostalgic for Figgis' earlier films when he attempted to tell stories: Stormy Monday, Internal Affairs, One Night Stand and his critical and commercial 1995 hit Leaving Las Vegas. You can't help but admire a filmmaker willing to capitalize on his cachet with a project as non-commercial as The Loss of Sexual Innocence. Every bit as downbeat as Leaving Las Vegas, Figgis' mix of contemporary drama and biblical allegory sputters away potential for emotional impact.
By the time The Loss of Sexual Innocence has come to a close, there is no denying its status as a Mike Figgis film. In a sea of factorylike commercial movies void of any distinctive features, The Loss of Sexual Innocence's best attribute is the fact you can still recognize its filmmaker's creative imprint. It's something seldom said anymore.
So it's no surprise to discover the film's African sequences reflect Figgis' childhood in Kenya. Figgis' filmmaker protagonist is a blatant projection of himself. An authentic auteur fighting the good fight for personalized filmmaking, Figgis writes, shoots, directs, edits, produces and frequently scores his movies. He practices a form of vertical creativity that shoulders all the blame for a failed project like The Loss of Sexual Innocence. Such cinematic stumbles are bound to happen with a filmmaker as unconventional as Figgis.
While Leaving Las Vegas, still Figgis' best film, excelled with its stellar lead performances, The Loss of Sexual Innocence eschews performances, substantial dialogue and acting in general for a purely visual tableau of dreamlike intensity. In some ways the most successful element of The Loss of Sexual Innocence is its sound more than its vision. Figgis has created a moody Jazz composition that creates a mesmerizing audible backdrop for the film.
Figgis' unifying themes of self-destruction and mankind's search for happiness and personal satisfaction are evident. The movie strives to traverse the realm of "entertainment" and manages to get the audience thinking. Its crippling problem is that it fails to make compelling any of its experimental tale or poetic photography. Its core subject matter is provocative, although much of the film veers to empty handed titillation.
Ultimately The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a challenging film, but not in the intellectual way in which it was intended.
Julian Sands remains aimless throughout the film as the sexually unsettled Nic. Saffron Burrows (Figgis' real-life girlfriend) is tossed aside, playing a pair of adult twins who enter Nic's life at the Rome airport. Here is the greatest danger of Figgis' script-lite method of making movies: Actors are forced to react more than act. Their expressions might appear natural. Their experiences become lifelike. It's disinteresting just the same. The Loss of Sexual Innocence confirms Figgis as an intelligent filmmaker. Unlike Leaving Las Vegas, his knack for character development is blatantly missing.
The Loss of Sexual Innocence wants to make audiences think. Instead, it's just the moviemade equivalent of cocktail philosophy: meaningless babble whose important appearance is deceiving. It's the difference between a challenging film and one that is simply pretentiously empty-handed. Cinematic good intentions aside, deep and significant never seemed so shallow.
CityBeat Grade: D.
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