The Loss of Sexual Innocence

Not all of it works, but you play along, because it's rare to find a film this ambitious. Read full review

[Figgis's] most venturesome, most personal - and least accessible film to date. If you open your mind and trust him completely, it's possible to experience the wrenching impact of this ravishingly beautiful and highly distinctive film. Read full review

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is not a masterpiece (at times, its obtuseness can seem ponderous and pretentious), it is nevertheless a fascinating experience, with the focus being on the artistic elements inherent in the medium rather than on the narrative. Read full review

It's visually stunning, especially in scenes of the African countryside, and takes more risks than most independent films. Read full review

The nonlinear story consists of loosely linked fragments, some more effective than others, threaded together in a broodingly poetic way. Read full review

There's some darn poignant stuff going on here.... The problem is that the audience will try to connect everything to the explicit Eden analogy, and not everything will. The director wins points for enticing you to figure it out, though, and I did enjoy it. Read full review

Much of it is risible, yet I loved watching it -not because I thought that the emperor was wearing new clothes but because I thought he looked fine - beautiful, actually - naked. Figgis' camera is probing and alive, so that even when his meanings are laughable, his images remain allusive and mysterious. Read full review

Boasting sublime imagery, but no characters to ground his reverie, the new pic heavily relies on an opaque narrative and elliptical editing. Read full review

It's one of those woozy Jungian art jobs, a series of elliptical, nearly wordless vignettes that are meant to strike a universal symbolist chord. Director Mike Figgis frames the movie with his baroquely contemporary documentary-like version of the Fall. Read full review

It's beautiful to look at, and marvelously edited, but it's hard to know exactly what he's getting at. [28 May 1999]

Much of the film is a nearly wordless tone poem that sustains an intense emotional gravity and sexual tension through its mixture of music, beautiful outdoor cinematography and somber, silent acting. Read full review

This is a gutsy, oddly inspiring film that embodies both the risks and rewards of artistic boldness. Read full review

The absence of substance, or its banishment, and the director's reliance on allure (in the film's casting and in its look and sound, which features haunting music by Beethoven and Chopin), leave Innocence with the quasi-profound, giggly overreach of a magazine layout come to shameless, shallow life. Read full review

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is not bad, as in the sense of inept; it's artful enough to show how truly trite it is. Read full review

There's not much of a spell to The Loss of Sexual Innocence, which is a shame, because anything this moody and pretty ought to be spellbinding. [16 Jul 1999]

The film's deliberate pace, its constantly confusing structure, its thematic vagueness and its clumsy and often embarrassingly amateurish Garden of Eden sequences combine to make The Loss of Sexual Innocence at best, a tough sit; at worst, a self-consciously arty parable of a self-indulgent filmmaker. [30 Jun 1999]

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a failure to be sure, but if it's not exactly a brave one, it's one whose foolhardiness deserves at least half a salute. Read full review

Mike Figgis raised enough cash to make this with a pretty good cast and a lot of technical skill, but it's still hard to endure at feature length. Read full review

Aggressively non-linear and heavy on the visual flair, Mike Figgis' allegorical voyage through the mind of a filmmaker alternates between the tawdry, fake sophistication of fancy perfume commercials and an unholy regurgitation of the worst excesses of European art cinema. Read full review

There's no getting around the fact that it's an uneven exercise that shows signs of having gestated too long. [04 Jun 1999]

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is belabored, pretentious and often willfully opaque. [25 Jun 1999]

Figgis depends on his considerable ability to evoke mood in a symphony of image, montage and music. But these scenes, watchable as some of them are (and I don't mean the Fall of Man Follies), don't accumulate into much more than abstract mush. [25 Jun 1999]

With The Loss of Sexual Innocence, director Mike Figgis reaches an almost comical low in the pursuit of what appears to be a desperate need to express deeper, uh, depth. Figgis' deliberate obfuscation may delight him, but it leaves the viewer mystified and bitter. [18 Jun 1999]

This is gold-plated navel gazing in the worst 60s style. Read full review

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a work of intransigent anger and barely relieved depression. [28 May 1999]

What I experienced was a lot of fetid experimental-film folderol perfumed by Chopin nocturnes on the soundtrack. Read full review

The film isn't short on ideas, it's just that those ideas are dumbfoundingly pretentious and trite. Read full review