Uma Thurman and Maria de Medeiros get very friendly

Uma Thurman and Maria de Medeiros in Henry & June (1990)

A film notable in history.

It was the first film ever to be rated NC-17. I can’t see any good reason for it. NC-17 means that 16 year olds may not attend under any circumstances. With an R rating, a 16 year old may attend with a parent. R would have been fine for this film. It’s an art film, the only controversy being the characters’ completely amoral and casual attitude toward sex. And that can’t be that controversial, since it’s a biopic, and that’s how those people really behaved!

It is a chapter in the life of the notoriously frank author Henry Miller, in the period when he wrote “Tropic of Cancer” in Paris, between the wars. Miller left his family behind and migrated to Paris for the sole purpose of becoming a great writer, because that’s what people did in his generation. So he rented a loft, lived in squalor, slept with multiple prostitutes, hung around cafes, smoked a zillion cigarettes, chatted with French intellectuals, and tried to live a life worth writing about.

During this time, Miller was married, but he was usually separated from his American wife by thousands of miles, and he became involved with the diarist Anais Nin, helping her to grow in many ways, especially sexually. Nin was also married, so the affair was carried out with circumspection, and required much dodging of both spouses. To make matters even spicier, Nin also fell in love with Miller’s wife when she visited Paris. (Their relationship is pictured in the linked scene.)

For a while there, director Philip Kaufman was one of my favorites. He fired The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Henry & June at us consecutively, three completely different movies, all great fun to watch for various reasons, all beautifully and imaginatively filmed, each intelligent, each with a consistent visual style distinct from the others. Variety was Kaufman’s thing. His defining characteristic is that all of his projects are so different from one another. When he wasn’t making arty films, he also wrote the screenplay for one of the best mainstream Westerns ever made, “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” and he wrote the original story for one of the most popular films of all time, “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” If you didn’t know, you probably wouldn’t guess that all those projects were accomplished by the same guy.

In his spare time he also managed to graduate from Harvard Law School.

He’s one of the true American treasures.

He’s retired now, but he emerged from retirement a few years ago, at age 76, to direct Hemingway and Bellhorn, a TV movie. Like Henry & June, that is a story about the romantic and sexual involvements of a famed “lost generation” author. I guess that’s the one theme Kaufman was willing to return to!