Mike Figgis has always been an arthouse director working in the mainstream; sometimes, as with Leaving Las Vegas, very successfully. But in his latest, most personal film, Figgis fatally oversteps the fine line between innovation and self-indulgence.
The Loss Of Sexual Innocence features fragments from the life of lead character Nic: as a child glimpsing a naked woman, as a teenager in his first serious romance, and as an adult (Sands) struggling with his marriage.If told simply, it could have been an absorbing, even poetic inquiry into sexual experience.
Figgis's mistake was to splice Nic's story with that of Adam and Eve. The sight of two naked beauties discovering sex before being hounded out of paradise by fascist thugs is pretentious, portentous, and really rather dull.
