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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
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
