Is sex back in film? In international cinema it never left. America, on the other hand, has never been too comfortable with the subject, no more today than in 1990 when it was forced to create a new rating for a studio film, Henry & June.
Director and writer Philip Kaufman was one of the only radicals of New Hollywood to stay radical well into the 1980s, subverting the horror film (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), the historical epic (The Right Stuff), and the literary adaptation (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). You can probably even ascribe the cynical core of Raiders of the Lost Ark to his early draft of that script. His Henry & June draws on Anaïs Nin’s journals to tell the story of her meeting expatriate Henry Miller in 1930s Paris, and the resulting love triangle with Miller’s wife June. Henry & June is perfectly cast with Uma Thurman as June, Maria de Medeiros as Nin (both future stars of Pulp Fiction), Fred Ward as Miller, and Richard E. Grant, who steals every scene as Nin’s clueless husband.
All this is to say we watched the hell out of this on VHS in the 1990s.
But does Henry & June still deserve its scandalous rep and does it capture anything real about writing life? We ask all these questions and more while still losing it every time Grant delivers the line reading, “Pussywillow.”
BRIAN J DAVIS: I don’t think we should dwell on Henry Miller or Anaïs Nin’s places in literary history. We should just talk about this movie as a movie itself and its identity as having the first NC-17 rating.
EMILY SCHULTZ: That’s good, because I hate Henry Miller.
BJD: I loved Black Spring. But not much else.
ES: I hated Black Spring.
BJD: Okay, Emily hates Henry Miller!
ES: I don’t know if that’s fair to say because I’ve never revisited Henry Miller as an adult. I picked Black Spring for a paper, probably because men I knew liked him. Whereas Anaïs Nin—
BJD: You based your entire 20s on her!
ES: Maybe. Yes.
BJD: Certainly Nin has lasted longer into our era because her writing—the journals, the lifelong project of herself as subject—it was Livejournal before Livejournal.
BJD: To switch to the rating discussion, we both grew up on the border. And R-rated movies meant something different in Ontario versus the US. I could take the bus over to Detroit as a teenager and see any R-rated film. They didn’t care. I saw Wild at Heart three times! In Ontario, R-rated movies were actively patrolled. Like, I snuck into Robocop when I was 13 and got pulled out of my seat! I got perp walked out of Robocop. So the American R-rating is kind of soft and the Ontario R was much more like NC-17 ended up being. Now, Canada does not have PG-13—
ES: No, it’s called 14A for adult accompaniment!
BJD: That led to some very surprising movies I was able see—Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II. I saw that in the theater when I was 12!
ES: That is a crazy-ass film for a 12-year-old to see at a theater. Wait. I’m looking up what was the rating on Hard to Hold. Wow. That was PG? My friend’s mom made us leave that one halfway through. I guess eight was too young for the raw truths of the Rick Springfield story.
BJD: The MPAA was so scandalized that a studio—Universal—was going to distribute Henry & June that they came up with NC-17. Meaning no one under 17 was admitted. That’s pretty much Ontario’s R rating but NC-17 was a flop here. Theater chains wouldn’t book NC-17 films. Video chains wouldn’t buy them. I’ll give the MPAA this: they tried.
ES: And what was it that offended them so much?
BJD: Apparently one of the biggies was this scene where Anaïs Nin is looking at a ukiyo-e Japanese print of a woman getting it on with an octopus.
ES: Correction, Brian: getting oral from an octopus.
BJD: You’re right. If it was missionary with an octopus they’d be okay with it. Now, if we still drank... We would have to take a drink every time Richard E. Grant says his pet name for Anaïs: Pussywillow.
ES: We could invent a shot called the Pussywillow.
[For those who care to play along at home, our shot “The Pussywillow” is Pernod with lime cordial, shaken and strained.]
BJD: Let’s talk about casting. Uma Thurman, Maria de Medeiros, Fred Ward. Richard E. Grant is coming off Withnail and I. This is casting gold.
ES: She’s complaining about her banker husband even “smelling like the bank now,” but he’s underwriting their lives. This was totally my model for like what I thought I wanted my life to be as a writer.
BJD: On this watch I realize this is Anaïs Nin’s movie. It’s all from her perspective. It’s her truth and fictions. But I’ll tell you why Henry Miller is important to this story.
ES: Why?
BJD: Henry Miller brings in the ridiculousness of choosing the artistic life when you’re working class. One thing I took from Tropic of Cancer—his advice that if you show up at someone’s house around dinnertime there’s likely to be food there.
ES: I remember you doing that! Having not eaten for two days because you’d spent your money on books or albums.
BJD: Okay. The stockings and slip budget of this movie was extraordinary.
ES: How long are we into the movie and how many affairs and longing looks!
BJD: The cloche hat. The bangs. That was so Young Literary Emily. Now this line. “We’re living in a dump in Brooklyn. But we’re living like kings.” How’s that line strike you now!?
ES: No comment. But I like how this moves so fast through the flashbacks they took from their fiction. It lets us stay in the actual movie.
BJD: Oh my God. Walking through Brooklyn with Emily is like Henry Miller walking through Montparnasse. You know everyone. They’re like waving baguettes and shouting, “ça va, Emily!”
ES: I haven’t learned to ask strangers for money yet. I might need to learn that skill. And here is Uma Thurman.
BJD: Filmmaking-wise, they make blackouts sexy. They’ll just blackout on a close-up or a lingering look.
ES: This film is really fifty percent smoldering looks.
BJD: It’s like they use horror movie techniques for the erotic scenes, with the blackouts and the dissonant strings.
ES: Uh oh. One partner likes to talk in bed, the other doesn’t.
BJD: If you date a writer, you gotta have some sexy talk. Get that material in shape. Rehearse. Workshop.
ES: Writers do love to talk.
BJD: Fabric is one of the sexiest things about this movie. Everything is draped just so.
ES: That’s easy on Uma Thurman! What movie are June and Anaïs watching?
BJD: Mädchen in Uniform.
ES: Classic!
BJD: Here’s a question. When Henry Miller is playing her for money, Anaïs knows it. He’s not subtle. But when June is, because she is such an inveterate hustler, it seems like Anaïs doesn’t know she’s getting played. Wait—Anaïs is wearing three different kinds of crushed velvet!
ES: It was 1990. That’s one of things about historical films. There’s always a bit too much of their own time in the design.
BJD: So this is a film by Philip Kaufman, who adapted The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
ES: This is so similar to that, with the triangle!
BJD: But it is flipped. It’s a triangle from the woman’s perspective—not the horny doctor played by Daniel Day Lewis.
ES: Oh this scene in the lesbian bar! This scene ruined my expectations of lesbian bars forever.
BJD: You mean: tuxedos and garters in a smoke filled boîte while a sultry version of Cab Calloway’s “St. James Infirmary Blues” is played?
ES: Exactly! Instead I got faucet chain necklaces and 4 Non Blondes.
BJD: Anaïs and June. Two femmes in a relationship. What do you think?
ES: Honestly, they are two bagel bottoms put together and there is going to be a lot of drama out of that! Look at the love bombing already. “I wanted to smoke opium with you.”
BJD: So what’s interesting is Anaïs wants Henry Miller’s muse. June wants Henry Miller’s money source.
ES: And Anaïs is misinterpreting everything.
BJD: And Richard E. Grant is treating her queerness like pneumonia, putting a cold cloth on her head. “You’ve had a bad spell of it, but you’re on your feet again.”
ES: “Besides, you’ll never see her again.” Wish fulfillment out loud.
BJD: Let’s talk about writers dating other writers.
ES: A good topic!
BJD: You and I essentially have two different forms. I’m incapable of writing a novel. So I write scripts, but you write novels. I think that’s why we’re relatively safe around any shared subject.
ES: So both Henry and Anaïs want to write about June. I’ve never had it happen where I’m writing on the same topic or themes as the person that I’m dating.
BJD: I don’t want to say being an artist is evil. But without saying it, I think we know the answer to what’s more important: personal relationships or material for the art? And it’s always material!
ES: You have to! But you try to not let anyone ever know that you made that choice.
BJD: And now the other part of the love triangle. With Henry Miller this time. And more sexy writer talk.
ES: And sexy musical instruments! Bongo intercutting while they have sex in the club.
BJD: And then the guitar strumming and nipple montage.
ES: That is coming up! I forgot.
BJD: And it’s where the eroticism gets into Jess Franco territory. Let’s give a shout-out to Richard E. Grant in this role. It is the thankless role that he makes his own.
ES: Is this his first role after Withnail and I?
BJD: Maybe third? He did Warlock before this! Where he’s a time traveling witch hunter and has an insane mullet.
[Brian explains the entire plot of Warlock during a lull in the film until a rather explicit chair sex scene happens between Miller and Nin.]
ES: Oh, is it the chair scene? The chair scene, I never, never forgot it.
BJD: Because for you, it’s like “I’m in my writing chair. Might as well stay here.”
ES: Probably! I mean, it’s slow motion sex in a chair. Piaf on the soundtrack. A bubbling pot of bouillabaisse.
BJD: Why are you laughing now?
ES: I’m laughing at how she really likes to talk about her other lovers when she’s with the other one.
BJD: This scene is a good tip for writers seducing other writers. Praise their work!
ES: It’s literally all you have to do.
BJD: This movie really captures how much of a writer’s day is just ranting.
ES: Like pacing back and forth, or doing dishes and…
BJD: Complaining how the first person POV isn’t respected anymore?
ES: More garters! And talking.
BJD: There are two places you’ve got room to try and fail. The stage, and the bedroom.
ES: It really depends who your audience is.
BJD: Okay, let me ask you a personal question. Have you ever stopped something because someone said the wrong dirty thing?
ES: I have! But I think that I’ve certainly said things that have freaked other people out a lot. Ooh. everything’s tacked up above the desk like that. That’s true to writers in any generation.
BJD: Yes, the writer/serial killer wall is true. As is this scene of editing each other’s work and it leading to breakup.
ES: Exactly. Writing isn’t just drunken sex. There is a lot of revision and editing work as well!
BJD: Now the art students’ ball. Compare this scene to the chaste version of this event in An American in Paris. But first, a Kevin Spacey warning. This might be a normal person’s breaking point with this film: a naked Kevin Spacey painted blue and talking about Nietzsche.
ES: And still clutching his briefcase so no one steals his ideas. It’s a good scene.
BJD: Anaïs Nin seems like the nicest girlfriend in the world. And all these men and women just project onto her.
ES: That's because the film is from her point of view!
BJD: And that’s a good way of talking about the next scene during the parade where she’s followed by her husband.
ES: I never liked it when I first saw the film. Because I think they play it up as a sexual assault at first, for the tension. That’s a bad reason.
BJD: Before turning it into her fantasy scene. She then writes afterwards “My first infidelity to Henry…was with my husband.”
ES: And now they’re a sexually awoken couple on their way to a brothel.
BJD: Thank you Universal for this movie!
ES: Okay, this movie is more explicit than I remember!
BJD: I think the difficult thing they did with this brothel scene was to start in a very unerotic mood. Then Anaïs takes control and it turns into a genuinely erotic scene.
ES: As in life!
BJD: So what’s the story with Eduardo, Anaïs’ cousin who’s just cruising various waiters and dance instructors across Paris?
ES: He needs more scenes.
BJD: He looks exactly like Ronan Farrow.
ES: And now she seduces her cousin.
BJD: Her first novel wasn’t called House of Socially Condoned Sex. It was called House of…
ES: She’s back at the brothel by herself. Getting ready to do some Delta of Venus here.
BJD: Now Henry Miller has finished his novel and is going back to Anaïs. And she’s waiting for him in—
ES: The sexiest lingerie in film history? I can’t believe I’m watching this in Christmas pajamas right now.
BJD: If you love Fred Ward, this movie is for you. And this scene: 100% all the Fred Ward you need.
ES: Do you know if they had an intimacy coordinator on this film?
BJD: They did, but he died of a heart attack.
ES: June Miller is back and upset with both presentations of herself in the writing.
BJD: So this is like your character coming to life and giving you notes. “I was expecting a little better.”
ES: Actually, I remember at the time thinking that June was kind of annoying. Why is he obsessed with her?
BJD: Anaïs just got read for filth. “You just want experience. You’re a writer!”
ES: Now June is threatening to go find better writers!
BJD: She should have threatened, I’m gonna go give James Joyce a handjob! That’s what I’m gonna do!” Alright, here’s the question: Do you think that two novelists can be a good couple?
ES: Yes, with boundaries.
BJD: Here’s the interesting thing about Kaufman’s films. There is still so much traditional storytelling in it. I love that this ends like a movie.
ES: That they just drive off? The characters part ways for the time being. With Henry Miller riding his bike behind the car without a care. It kind of ends on the theme of possession.
BJD: And Anaïs’s final voice over. “I wept because I had lost my pain and I was unaccustomed to its absence.” I think I’m going to cry!
ES: Then this final title kicker!
BJD: “June became a social worker in Queens.”