Risky: would I be disillusioned? Would it be as good as I remembered? Or maybe my tastes had simply changed in the intervening twenty years (bear in mind, I once thought Siesta (1987) was a profound art movie. This weekend I re-watched Henry and June for the first time in about two decades. I watched it over and over again, dragging friends, and started dipping into the sexually-charged works of Miller and Nin.
The film was transformative, firing my imagination of what a creative beatnik life ideally should be. At the time, Philip Kaufman’s exploration of the romantic and literary triangle between Anais Nin, Henry Miller and his wife June and his supremely seductive depiction of 1930s Parisian bohemia seemed to me to be the ne plus ultra in decadence. I would have first seen the 1990 film Henry and June as a 21-year old university student in Ottawa, Ontario.
Maria de Medeiros as Anais Nin and Uma Thurman as June Miller in Henry and June /
