After reading and enjoying Anais Nin's disguised-as-fiction Cities of the Interior, which is five books in her erotic diary spanning the mid 1930s to the early 1970s (she died in January of 1977), I decided to check out her earlier, undisguised work from the life-changing year of 1931. Not having read those books yet, I also rented Philip Kaufman's cinematic rendering of Henry and June based on Nin's sexual crisis in her account of meeting Henry and June Miller in bohemian Paris during the early thirties. Perhaps I should've waited until I read her unexpurgated diary.

Henry Miller, as some of you may know, later published his very controversial Tropic of Cancer that was banned nearly everywhere for numerous decades, but when he is introduced to Anais by her banker husband (don't know the connection) early in the movie the fortiesh, rugged-looking man gone half-bald is still struggling to write the book.

June Miller: It's a distortion. Henry, Look at me! Look! You can't see me or anyone as they are! I wanted Dostoyevsky!

Henry's self-obsessed wife June shows up not much after Henry and Anais have gotten to know each other a little better after she accidentally finds him weeping in a dark theater while watching his movie star wife in an artsy love scene. He tries to capture her in his book, but when he lets June and Anais read what he has done, his wife feels cheated and misunderstood (see the quote above) and Anais privately tells him he has no compassion for June and cannot understand her like she, a woman, can.

Anais has been writing her first published book on D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover) and she and Henry have an interesting disagreement about Lawrence at first until he concedes to her view. She now tells him she will write about him and June, which shocks him. She has become obsessed with him as well as June and they also are with her, though love is what all of them call it.

This is where the movie loses its focus and becomes boring and meaningless to me, but it may not be that way for you. Anais still loves her, um, well-hung husband and relishes their couplings just as much as she does with Henry and June (separately in secret). She's not discovering that she's a lesbian, but rather feeding her sexual obsession, her need for more pleasure and, I gather, to feel more alive and fulfilled as a woman. She brings her husband with her to a lesbian bordello where they pay to watch two women getting it on and to learn new ways of making love.

I have never been aroused at the sight of lesbian love, or gay love for that matter, in movies. I have watched a few movies where it was included, such as The Hunger and Bound, but it bores me so that I fast-forward through it. In Henry and June Anais was having deliberate or unplanned sex with both sexes, or dreaming about it, and it didn't even seem that they really felt much passion for each other. Obsession is not love for others, but only yourself.

Anaïs Nin: I'm passing through a crisis Eduardo.
Eduardo Sanchez: Be careful Anais, abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.

Eduardo is another lover she uses to try to cover up her affair with Henry. June isn't fooled for long, though. Anais' husband, of course, has been fooled all along somehow. Anais does have an innocent, fragile look because she's so dimunitive and possesses an ethereal beauty. Maria de Medeiros who plays her looks much like Nin in real life and enchantingly carries the movie on her thin shoulders. Anais, even June, believe they are innocent and pure in the movie, but how? It was bewildering to me.

Fred Ward gives us an amusing, rakish kind of Henry. It must be noted that we perceive him through Anais' romanticized picture of him and Ward is an interesting, okay choice to play him, but Alec Baldwin had been first offered the role and would've made the movie sizzle more. Uma Thurman brings her smoldering beauty to her role as June, seducing with her eyes like a cat ready to pounce and showing up for about twenty five minutes of the Henry and June's 136 minutes' running time. I couldn't understand why anyone would be obsessed by her, but that's me.

I tried to watch the movie a second time so I could appreciate how this lust triangle implodes at the end, but I couldn't do it. I've concluded that 1) I'm not the right woman to appreciate it and 2) I should read Anais' book. Maybe I also don't have enough of the bohemian in me to fall under the spell of Paris in the 1930s when naked, masked or blue-bodied people cavorted in the streets.

The movie drags after the first half without real direction until the last few raw scenes. Then it's supposed to be the pay-off, a devastating mind job, but for me it lacked much impact because I ceased caring for the characters long ago. It reminds me of Last Tango in Paris, which I didn't like as a whole (Marlon Brando was the exception), so if you enjoyed that movie you will might enjoy Kaufman's longer Henry and June.

The questionable rating NC-17 was created for this 1990 movie with its abundance of female nudity and little of unexciting male nudity, the free use of "f*ck" and talk of drug use, as well as all the violent sex even if it may have been marital. No Special Features were in the standard-issue DVD.

NOTE - I've read the book Henry and June and gave it five stars on epinions.com. It's much more arresting and understandable than the movie.