‘Henry & June’: It’s an X, but the Public Is Not Served

Last week, Universal screened “Henry & June,” Philip Kaufman’s already controversial film about Henry Miller, his wife, June, and writer Anais Nin in Paris in 1931. The purpose of the screening was less for reviews, as such, than to engender sympathy for the film’s struggle against its X rating and in favor of an R rating without trims.

As reports from the Venice Film Festival, where “Henry & June” was shown last week, make clear, opinions differ sharply as to its success as a work of the filmmakers’ art.

What is beyond question, however, is that “Henry & June” is a seriously intended, thoughtful and non-exploitative film. Its subject matter happens to be human sexuality and three people who raised hob with the taboos and the silence that shrouded it in their time.

The question is, should it be rated X? In my judgment, it is an X-rated film or the ratings system--offering parental guidance for children--has lost its bearings altogether. It is an adult film, by, for and about adults, and I think that neither the Kaufmans (Phil and his wife, Rose, wrote it together) nor anyone else involved would seriously deny that.

A following question is whether Universal should ask Kaufman to cut the film to achieve an R rating. The answer to that has to be a resounding no! In the first place, I can’t imagine what or where you would begin to trim. The film is all of a piece, and the butchery would destroy a piece of art without attracting a dozen more customers.

A further following question is whether Universal should release the film without a rating at all, using only such a cautionary note as the studio saw fit to apply. This seems to me to be an entirely sensible answer, even though the major studios are, in theory, pledged to use whatever rating the MPAA ultimately assigns and to not release unrated films.

But the pledge now seems as anachronistic as the X itself. If the distributors and the exhibitors can’t bring themselves to dump the X in favor of the less inflammatory A (adults only) or NC (no children), there is no reason to compound the error by cutting the sense out of the product in the bootless hope of conning a few more dollars out of the public.

“Henry & June” is an art film, insufficiently prurient to be satisfying to the sex trade of any age, but provocative enough in its questionings about sexuality and sexual behavior to demand more maturity than most of the under-17s are likely to have.

An underlying question in all this is how much harm an X rating actually does to the business of a film, especially a film like “Henry & June,” which--despite the notoriety it is acquiring--is not a mass audience picture. It may well be that the harm an X does, insofar as it can be measured, is--to coin a phrase--overrated.

It may be that given all the pressure, the X rating will be overthrown in the appeals process the first week in October. That won’t be a tragedy, only a further indication of the present disarray in the ratings system that Jack Valenti is going to have to address forcefully sooner or later.