Movies

Empty Innocence

Pretty images and sound can't overcome a pointless film

By David Theis 

British director Mike Figgis came to filmmaking from the worlds of music and experimental theater. His love of music, coupled with his conception of film as a quasi multimedia form, has led to some great soundtracks — Leaving Las Vegas and Stormy Monday, for example — on which he first performed the jazz scores and then wove their sound deeply into the texture of the films.

Those two films were memorable, in part because Figgis adapted what he had learned in theater and music to the demands of commercial cinema. As rich as those films were in terms of pure image and sound, they were also grounded in strong, compelling characters. Nicholas Cage's mysteriously suicidal character in Leaving Las Vegas was a sort of Bartleby for the '90s. Give up drinking? Lengthen his life span? He'd prefer not to.

But in Figgis's latest, The Loss of Sexual Innocence, his attraction toward avant-garde theater has come back to bite him. This film is about humanity's loss of innocence, about one man's loss of innocence and about Adam and Eve's loss of innocence. Really. This concept, which may or may not have worked as a piece of performance art (that's a little generous — it's a silly idea) is a surefire disaster on film.

Like its predecessors, Sexual Innocence looks and sounds great, though the classical score Figgis uses here is less gripping than were the jazz tracks for Stormy Monday and Leaving Las Vegas. And there are some striking images: the Nordic Eve and African Adam (first-time actors Hanne Klintoe and Femi Ogumbanjo) rising naked and childlike from a primeval lake; a tribe of blue-clad and apparently blue-hued nomads wandering the Sahara; a decrepit old missionary, drowsing, Bible in hand, while an African girl dressed only in bra and panties stands in front of him, reading from who knows what.

Young Nic (John Cowey) is spying on the disturbing pair. He's a five-year-old Brit who has apparently been dragged to Africa by missionary parents. Perhaps seeing the old man revealed as an impotent lecher triggers Nic's "loss of sexual innocence," as the film cuts away from him to the first interaction between Adam and Eve — Adam pawing at her breasts, Eve handling his genitals like a bunch of grapes.

The film then flashes forward to other scenes from Nic's life. Nic as a fat 12-year-old (George Moktar), humiliated in gym class. Nic as a young man (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), humiliated and made burningly jealous by his girlfriend. The adult Nic (Julian Sands), apparently so damaged by his past that he is unable to be a loving husband to his lovely wife (Johanna Torrel).

In the meantime, Adam and Eve wander around paradise. Eve meets the snake; Eve eats the fruit; Eve looks upon Adam's sexual organs with a more discerning eye. And finally, the mating of our mythological parents, followed by their sad and sudden wising up. Figgis offers fascist storm troopers as the archangels expelling them from paradise. In case you're missing any of the points he's making, Figgis has a neon cross glowing in the background. When the gate to paradise slams shut, the cross seems to mock poor Adam and Eve.

The film isn't as schematic as it sounds. Nic has been pretty gloomy throughout, so the film never suggests he was ever in any paradise. And Nic's story is complicated by various subplots, one involving a pair of twins separated at birth (this was actually the film's most interesting riff). It's further obscured by the fact that the various Nics don't look alike. It is hard to tell they are supposed to be him until fairly deep into the film.

The stages in Nic's life are presented as individual pages, devoid of context, ripped out of a book. He is almost as insubstantial as Adam, and there is virtually no resonance among the various stages of his life. The little stabs at meaning that the film offers are uniformly trite. Young Nic was betrayed by a girlfriend, so old Nic has become a cad. Is that all we get for the price of admission?

Figgis has completely given himself over to image and sound here — to mere mood. And he has fallen into a trap called the banality of beauty. Everyone (excepting the fat boy and drowsy preacher) looks like a moonlighting model, and the film finally plays more as a Vogue fashion shoot come-to-life than as a meditation on anything, much less humanity's loss of innocence.

Intentionally or not, Figgis has become a part of the trend toward a sort of neosilent movie. Images are everything; words are used sparingly and carry little weight. Bertolucci's Besieged has a similar texture, but is much more successful, precisely because it doesn't try to be about anything more than its surfaces, its wonderfully accomplished interplay of music, image and texture.

But Figgis wants to make a grand statement (summarized neatly in his title), complete with a brief but scathing indictment of Christianity. And that's a lot more cross than this stultifying movie can bear.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence. Directed by Mike Figgis. With Hanne Klintoe, Femi Ogumbanjo, Julian Sands, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Johanna Torrel. Rated R.Figgis has completely given himself over to image and sound here to mere mood. And he has fallen into a trap called the banality

of beauty.