British director Mike Figgis is one of those film authors that make art cinema an acquired taste. Many of his films are too depressive, have too much style at the expense of content and are often full of references and other details only Figgis could properly understand and appreciate. Figgis, despite that, had some success in 1990s Hollywood, place not exactly friendly for such brand of film making, but it was mostly due to those films, like police thriller Internal Affairs or “Oscar”-awarded drama Leaving Las Vegas, being sufficiently close to mainstream in terms of genre and style. After the success of the latter, Figgis turned towards experimental forms of cinema in his 1999 semi-autobiographical drama The Loss of Sexual Innocence (sometimes distributed under alternative title Death and the Loss of Sexual Innocence).
Script, which was written by Figgis, lacks the conventional plot. Instead we follow vignettes depicting every day life of film director Nic (played by Julian Sands) who lives with his wife (played by Johanna Torrell) and son (played by Gerian Ellis). Nic is often reminded of the events from various periods of his life – as 5-year old boy (played by John Cowey) living in British Kenya, as 12-year old boy (played by George Moktar) growing up in dreary industrial city in England and, finally, as 16-year old youth (played by Jonathan Rhys Myers) dealing with infidelity of his girlfriend (played by Kelly Macdonald). Nic leaves his home in order to shoot documentary in Tunis with the help of audio engineer Luca (played by Stefano Dionisi) and becomes attracted to Luca’s assistant (played by Saffron Burrows) whose twin sister lives in England. All those subplot are connected with allegorical story about pair of teenagers – black Adam (played by Femi Ogubanjo) and white Eve (played by Hanne Klintoe).
Due to unusual narrative structure, The Loss of Sexual Innocence looks interesting at first, but the novelty quickly wears off and its flaws become quite apparent. The main problem is in Figgis’ inability to connect semi-autobiographical vignettes into coherent whole. He tries with explanatory titles that often appear too pretentious and make the film even more confusing to the audience. Melodramatic subplot involving twin sisters seems unnecessary, although Figgis had some personal reason to put it into the film, since he had romantic relationship with Saffron Burrows at the time of production. Former fashion model looks really good and cinematography by Benoit Delhomme helps in creating such impression. Figgis again shows his great love for music, with soundtrack based on classic motives being put to good use. The cast is very good, sometimes having to act without spoken text or clothes on, is also sufficiently good. This is enough for The Loss of Sexual Innocence to get more than passing grade by viewers accustomed to art and experimental cinema.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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