Context is everything. If you come to this cold, you will think it an amateurish production of an artless man and his life.
Miller's reason to be in our life was his place in moving a barrier of sexual prudishness to a more defensible location. Thus for a decade or so, the arbiters of art celebrated his boldness and the marketplace of prurience sprinkled him about, ensuring that he is "read." Now, his life seems merely feckless and his art artless.
So if you accept this as it was intended and received when new, you'll be disappointed. All the gas has gone out of that excuse for our time. But I saw this together with "La Dolce Vita." That film is sublimely competent, a beautiful receptacle whose beauty amplifies its emptiness. So too is the story, about beautiful people with empty lives, people we would just as soon never existed.
So take this as a beat version of that film. Accept its provenance, as a film by a hippie painter, and its proximity to the actual Miller and his actual, now completely worthless life. Take it that way and it works.
If you take out the sex scenes, the actual humping, you get a rather well conceived portrait. Its a collection of sequences, each sequence defined by the woman or women who were the target of that sexual encounter. Each woman exists only as a receptacle.
One involves a runaway retarded girl of fifteen who provides a specific type of sexual availability. I suppose all the events in this film actually happened, but the way she is depicted surely references "Lolita," a sort of 800 pound gorilla or sexual literature. The point with Lolita was the untrusted narrator. Here, its more like "Withnail," an untrusted life.
The other notable woman is the last one. She really is lovely, almost precisely a cross between Anita Ekberg and Nico, both of "la Dolce." This woman has two children. Her husband is dead. She comes home with Miller and lays down nude with him to have sex, then balks. He pursues her, almost raping, but she escapes. Its the perfect end, as far from erotic as one can get. Has very much a Fellini manner, that sequence, allowing for the music.
So the striking thing about this is the same as in Fellini's film. There's a fantasy involved, but it is not the romantic fantasy that film usually supports and perhaps invented. Its the opposite of that fantasy: a life without a happy ever after.
As with Fellini, some of the compositions are superb.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
Miller's reason to be in our life was his place in moving a barrier of sexual prudishness to a more defensible location. Thus for a decade or so, the arbiters of art celebrated his boldness and the marketplace of prurience sprinkled him about, ensuring that he is "read." Now, his life seems merely feckless and his art artless.
So if you accept this as it was intended and received when new, you'll be disappointed. All the gas has gone out of that excuse for our time. But I saw this together with "La Dolce Vita." That film is sublimely competent, a beautiful receptacle whose beauty amplifies its emptiness. So too is the story, about beautiful people with empty lives, people we would just as soon never existed.
So take this as a beat version of that film. Accept its provenance, as a film by a hippie painter, and its proximity to the actual Miller and his actual, now completely worthless life. Take it that way and it works.
If you take out the sex scenes, the actual humping, you get a rather well conceived portrait. Its a collection of sequences, each sequence defined by the woman or women who were the target of that sexual encounter. Each woman exists only as a receptacle.
One involves a runaway retarded girl of fifteen who provides a specific type of sexual availability. I suppose all the events in this film actually happened, but the way she is depicted surely references "Lolita," a sort of 800 pound gorilla or sexual literature. The point with Lolita was the untrusted narrator. Here, its more like "Withnail," an untrusted life.
The other notable woman is the last one. She really is lovely, almost precisely a cross between Anita Ekberg and Nico, both of "la Dolce." This woman has two children. Her husband is dead. She comes home with Miller and lays down nude with him to have sex, then balks. He pursues her, almost raping, but she escapes. Its the perfect end, as far from erotic as one can get. Has very much a Fellini manner, that sequence, allowing for the music.
So the striking thing about this is the same as in Fellini's film. There's a fantasy involved, but it is not the romantic fantasy that film usually supports and perhaps invented. Its the opposite of that fantasy: a life without a happy ever after.
As with Fellini, some of the compositions are superb.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.