Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #68667 in DVD
• Released on: 1999-12-07
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 106 minutes

Amazon.com
At turns both mesmerizing and frustrating, Mike Figgis's 1999 experimental feature interweaves an audacious dramatization of the Adam and Eve myth with autobiographical vignettes from the director's life. In Figgis's golden rendering of the Genesis tale, the first humans are a black man (Femi Ogumbanjo) and a white woman (Hanne Klintoe), who emerge one day, fully formed, from a lake, and regard each other with playful wonder. They discover, like children, their anatomical differences, and explore the surrounding green paradise until coming upon the tree of knowledge. From this they eat and almost instantly reevaluate one another with a steely lust. Thus their, and our, fabled fall from grace ends in the mire of sexual possession and walled-off feeling, a tragedy that Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) uses as a touchstone for the contemporary story of a filmmaker named Nic (Julian Sands). Nic's own youthful experiences with various kinds of formative humiliation, including finding his teenage girlfriend in bed with his best friend, are presented as flashbacks meant to resonate with his marital unhappiness today. Less clear are other moments out of time that don't particularly connect with Figgis's major theme, especially an odd development in which twin sisters (both played by Saffron Burrows), each unaware of the other's existence, have a fleeting, worlds-are-colliding encounter at an airport. Figgis also reaches into a grab bag of Nic's other old sorrows, things that don't uniquely inform or enhance the film's point, and muddies things up a bit. But the sheer hubris of marrying a myth with a memoir carries the day here, and Figgis leaps the hurdle of potential self-parody with a certain courage. --Tom Keogh

From The New Yorker
The new Mike Figgis film, his first feature since the glossy "One Night Stand," marks one of his irregular forays into dreamy experiment. In a loose way, it tells the story of Nic; we see him as a young boy in Africa, as an older boy back in England, as a sexually thwarted teen-ager (played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), and then as an adult (Julian Sands) who leaves his family and travels back to the desert. These fragmentary episodes are spliced with the story of Adam and Eve: a black man and a white woman rise naked from a lake and take it from there; in a bold departure, the role of the fateful apple is played by figs. These sequences badly skew the film-not because of explicitness but because their import is so obvious that it flattens the other narratives. There is much that is infuriating and pretentious here, but you can forgive Figgis almost anything, because his ambition allows him to stumble upon sights that no other director could envisage; the cheap, granular quality of the picture, with its hot, earthy colors, gets under your skin, and there is one section, entitled "Twins," that is the most haunting thing he has ever done. Two adult sisters who were separated at birth (both played wonderfully by Saffron Burrows) pass each other at an airport. The heartache of their near-miss needs a whole movie to itself. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Fascinating, poignant artistry
This is one of those movies that seems like a rental when you see it advertised on the big screen, and you become a little sad that you didn't see it there when you get home and enjoy it in the privacy of your own home. THE LOSS OF SEXUAL INNOCENCE is profoundly effective through its ability to not tell the story of an emotion or emotions, but (through non-linear structure, visual narrative and improvisation over meaning-laden dialogue, and provocative retelling of religious myth as a thread of symbolism) to actually put emotion on film. You see and feel jealousy, guilt, shame, passion, epiphany, rage, desire, despair, total confusion, and every other emotion that makes up the experience of the loss of sexual innocence. There are scenes that seem not to work as well as others. Yet even in saying that, the impulse is to critique them in the context of the linear films we are used to seeing out of Hollywood, when that isn't the kind of film the director actually made. Fans of MAGNOLIA, I think, as well as the films of Bertolucci, will like this film a lot; anyone else who is in the mood for something different should definitely follow their instincts when they go "Hmmm..." after reading the title.

paradise lost
You've got to admire ambition. The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a meditative, impressionistic, mostly dialogue-less, deeply beautiful and aggressively non-linear exploration of various forms of innocence lost--or shattered. The chopped-up plot structure at first is confusing, but as the threads start to come together the parrallels drawn and metaphors presented are provocative. A film that makes its audience really think ought to be appreciated in our age of brainless blockbusters. Though it is best to keep in mind that there is no solid main point, no overall meaning you're meant to find in the film. In the end it is more like a piece of music than a story: weaving themes in and out, leaving the audience to form their own opinions and interpretations. While it doesn't succeed with flying colors, it is certainly worthwhile and interesting, and stunningly gorgeous to boot.

WARNING: this film will not hold your hand.
This is a beautifully produced film presented in a nonlinear narrative about the innocence and experience of a man (Nic) as he grows-up.

To give a little bit of structure to the confusion expressed in some of the other reviews...

Nic is the little blond haired boy in the beginning, Nic is at the funeral of his girlfriends father, Flashback: Nic is (almost) caught with his girlfriend by her father, Nic is the fat boy looking at the photos of dead bodies, Nic is the fat boy being taunted and beaten in the gym, Nic is the man going to the cottage with his wife, and Nic is the man in the desert shooting video...

I recommend the video to the experienced art cinema patron. I did not give the film five stars because it was not overwhelmingly inspiring... it lingers with you.