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"The Loss of Sexual Innocence" | page 1, 2

Like "Leaving Las Vegas," "The Loss of Sexual Innocence" was shot in Super 16mm and blown up to 35mm. Benoit Delhomme's cinematography has a slightly grainy texture and a ripeness that comes from being saturated in yellows and reds. Figgis has claimed that Super 16 allows him to shoot longer takes (up to 14 minutes) and what that's revealed is his talent for capturing unmediated experience, for allowing us to see characters simply going through their lives. This works beautifully in the sex scenes. In one of them, 16-year-old Nic (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers of "Velvet Goldmine") is making out with his girlfriend Susan (Kelly MacDonald) in her parents' parlor while trying to keep from waking them. The scene goes on for a few minutes, allowing Figgis to capture the ebb and flow, the implicit negotiation, of adolescent sex. Nic becomes more and more excited, Susan is put more and more on her guard. A foot crashing into a tea tray puts things to a stop. Cups and saucers are righted, the girl rearranges herself and the poor guy finds himself back at square one. It's impossible to think of any other way of doing that scene, of capturing that interplay without allowing it to go on. And it's the same when the adult Nic comes up behind his wife (Johanna Torrel) while she's chopping vegetables for dinner and begins squeezing her nipple. We sense her annoyance, then her almost involuntary arousal, and finally the mixture of impatience and excitement with which she raises her skirt. The whole of a marriage seems to exist in that scene, the familiarity and comfort, the skirmish for power, the resentments that no longer need to be spoken, the sexual connection that, temporarily at least, can blot everything else out.

If "The Loss of Sexual Innocence" is Figgis' most extreme work as a stylist, moments like these suggest that he could go even deeper by simply focusing on his skills as an observer. In one scene, we follow a young woman (Saffron Burrows) as she gets out of bed in the morning, her lazy movements as she drags herself to the shower contrasting with her precise clipped ones as she dresses herself for work, appraising herself in the mirror, changing her outfit. All the while the radio is broadcasting news, and the total effect of the scene is of the world, bit by bit, making itself felt in this woman's life, of a private persona giving way to a public one.

That's a kind of observation of behavior that perhaps only Eric Rohmer or Jacques Rivette has captured. And combined with the superb work Figgis has done in the past with actors (and does here with, in small roles, MacDonald and Gina McKee, currently to be seen as the only human being in "Notting Hill"), it suggests that the experimentation Figgis engages in here may be hindering his best work. During some of the most image-driven moments, the classical piano music he uses on the soundtrack gives the film an almost perfume-ad air. And the denouement, with Nic and his crew precipitating a disaster during the making of a film, resurrects the clichés that equate the making of a film in the third world with colonialist exploitation. It also resurrects the worst parts of the Adam and Eve story, the combination of misogyny and Puritanism.

There's plenty of evidence of Figgis' talent throughout "The Loss of Sexual Innocence," but it also suggests he's still discovering the nature of that talent. Figgis' talent is in the specifics, not the atmospherics. And it's not in the story of the Fall; he's one of the few directors who can put sex on the screen without being crippled by shame.
salon.com | May 28, 1999

 

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About the writer Charles Taylor is a Salon contributing writer. His Home Movies video column appears every other Monday in Salon Arts & Entertainment. Sound off Send us a Letter to the Editor Send e-mail to Charles Taylor Related Salon stories Acting weird Nicolas Cage on selling imperfection. By Elgy Gillespie - [08/07/98] Isn't it romantic? "One Night Stand," Mike Figgis' tale of an adulterous evening, has some fine acting, but it falls short of true, juicy melodrama. By Charles Taylor - [11/14/97]

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