June 22, 1999
Web posted at: 1:42 p.m. EDT (1742 GMT)

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- You could pretty much see this one coming.

Director Mike Figgis made a name for himself in 1995 with "Leaving Las Vegas," a film that some people regard as a burningly insightful portrayal of one alcoholic's descent into besotted hell. Somehow, Figgis managed to make it look like slow suicide is profound suicide, and that smashing a glass patio table to smithereens with your own torso is the height of hip self-awareness. Nicolas Cage won an Oscar for the ordeal, and booze hounds across the country shed a tear over the unexpected acclaim.

Not surprisingly, Figgis' next film, "One Night Stand" (1997), was another thinly-plotted mess. But the cast (including Wesley Snipes and Robert Downey Jr., both of whom give career performances) kept it afloat when the director lingered forever on mundane scenes and pretended to be diving for pearls while actually skipping across the surface of a puddle. Most troubling, though, was Figgis' insistence on getting artsy with his camera and editing when he should have been more concerned with telling a story.

This "progression" can now be viewed as a harbinger of Figgis' laughably pretentious new film, "The Loss of Sexual Innocence." A supposedly perceptive study of man's fall from grace (or something or other), "Sexual Innocence" seems more like the yield of an over-reaching 20-year-old film student than that of a grown man with a body of work behind him.

There's no conventional plot at all this time, which would be fine if there were any true wisdom in evidence. Instead, Figgis serves up a bunch of chin-scratching hokum that veers back and forth in time, frequently fades to black and keeps getting interrupted by enlightening shots of a scrumptious-looking Adam and Eve doing things like catching fish with their hands and gaping wide-eyed as they watch each other pee into a river.

The film, shot on Super 16 by cinematographer Benoît Delhomme, looks beautiful, and there's some equally gorgeous music by Schumann and Chopin (along with some lackadaisical jazz backing by Figgis himself) floating behind the images.

Movies aren't postcards, of course, but that's what this one feels like. Figgis is sending us a series of ravishing-if-vague missives about his own sexuality, without even bothering to write "Wish you were here" on the back. For all the rigmarole about coupling, the movie turns out to be an ode to cinematic self-gratification.

Julian Sands stars as Nic, although his character is never introduced in any constructive way. We just see his sexual awakening when he was a little boy in Kenya (where he spies an old white man making a young black girl dress in garters and haltingly read to him). Then we watch the adolescent version of Sands' character (played by professional pouter Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) as he struggles to get his hesitant girlfriend to do the dirty deed with him.

After some sweaty living room fumbling between the couple, we jump ahead in time and see Sands driving through the countryside and arguing with his unhappy wife Susan (Kelly MacDonald). After Sands gawks at a gas-station toilet that's been stuffed full of ripped-up porno magazine spreads, we watch the couple have dispassionate sex at the kitchen sink.

The psychological underpinnings are telegraphed here by the uninterested Susan, who uses a knife to cut a great big carrot into itty-bitty pieces during sex with Nic. It's chuckle-inducing symbolism like that that gives Sigmund Freud a bad name, let alone Mike Figgis.

But the unintentional comedy doesn't stop there, not by a long shot. There are also two mind-boggling dream sequences that look like they were conceived by David Lynch after a lunch of bad clams. (The dreams, by the way, are introduced with portentous title cards that read "her dream" and "his dream;" the movie is loaded with portentous title cards.)

Mixed in with all this is a subplot about a couple of twins (played almost wordlessly by Saffron Burrows) who are separated at birth, only to pass each other 20-odd years later at an airport. It has nothing to do with sex, and probably nothing to do with anything. But it's there and it looks good, so I'm sure Figgis is impressed.

By the time the apple-digesting Adam and Eve are pursued through the Gates of Eden by a horde of paparazzi, you may wish you'd never heard of sex at all. Now that's an accomplishment.

There's surprisingly little sex in "The Loss of Sexual Innocence," although what's there is a bit graphic. There's nudity, of course, with Adam and Eve doing the full-frontal thing every time you see them. I wonder if actors get paid extra for urinating on-camera. Rated R. 106 minutes.