When I write film reviews, I almost never give movies a score of 1, no matter how badly I hated it, unless it is completely incomprehensible on any level, generally a movie that literally has no discernible plot (unless it is a film that is meant to have no plot). There's a ridiculous horror movie called Nightmare Weekend, for example, that deserves a 1 for that exact reason. All three Scary Movies deserved a vote of 1, if even that high, even though they had clear plots. Those are in a curious group of movies that are so bad they deserve special recognition.
With The Loss of Sexual Innocence, you have a movie that has no plot but whose style and philosophical depth gives it the right not to have one. It's a weird movie that is strung together like a lot of completely unrelated scenes one after the other, but it plays like a series of dreams that come together at the end and then meaning kind of hits you. It's notable that so much of the movie seems meaningless and random and yet at the end of the movie the message is so powerful that it's amazing that you hadn't caught on already.
I don't pretend to understand everything that the movie is trying to say, but if nothing else the movie is stunningly photographed. Even the uncomfortable and ugly scenes are cleverly shot. Consider, for example, the various 'Scenes from Nature." All of them are very short and wordless and contain something like a naked person emerging from a still pond, walking up the bank, and looking around, but they are some of the most beautiful shots in the movie, and not just because of the nudity, obviously, since the nudity is total and yet none of the scenes are even remotely sexy. They clearly represent a time of total sexual innocence, since they are so clearly meant to signify some type of Adam and Eve scenario. In the third scene from nature, there is a black man and a white woman walking down to the still pond that the first two scenes from nature showed them emerging from, and after catching a fish and having no idea what to do with it, they marvel at their urination function and the differences between their bodies.
From there we cut back to the present, where the rest of the movie takes place, and watch a series of people acting not nearly as sexually innocent as that man and woman were. A little more than halfway through the movie we see the woman wandering through the garden, I guess you could call it, and she comes across a statue of Jesus on the cross and then a rusted out automobile. She's fascinated by it, and then she goes around and starts eating things off of the trees which, if I know anything about the Garden of Eden, is some pretty reckless behavior. Ultimately she and the man eat off of the trees until they make themselves sick. When they wake up after being down with the sickness, their innocence has been lost, they see each other and the world differently than before, and they ultimately manage to get themselves kicked out of the Garden.
The movie cuts back and forth between modern times and this sort of ancient Garden of Eden setting, interestingly showing innocence lost in both of them in a way in which they kind of meet up at the end, and one of the characters turns out to be the filmmaker making a documentary of it all along the way. There is a powerful scene near the end of the film in which the filmmaker and his crew are traveling across a desert and, after getting into an argument about an interesting thing that they hear on the radio, they hit and kill a young boy from a tribe of blue people who evidently live in the desert. The first thing that struck me about this scene is not that it showed how this filmmaker and his crew had long since lost their innocence, but how it turned out that they were not the only ones. The movie is not about how any certain people have lost their sexual innocence or any other kind of innocence, it's about how the entire human race has lost their innocence.
Oh and here's some advice, watch the movie with the subtitles on, because it switches back and forth between various languages and is also recorded so quietly that many times you can't hear what people are saying even when they're speaking English.
With The Loss of Sexual Innocence, you have a movie that has no plot but whose style and philosophical depth gives it the right not to have one. It's a weird movie that is strung together like a lot of completely unrelated scenes one after the other, but it plays like a series of dreams that come together at the end and then meaning kind of hits you. It's notable that so much of the movie seems meaningless and random and yet at the end of the movie the message is so powerful that it's amazing that you hadn't caught on already.
I don't pretend to understand everything that the movie is trying to say, but if nothing else the movie is stunningly photographed. Even the uncomfortable and ugly scenes are cleverly shot. Consider, for example, the various 'Scenes from Nature." All of them are very short and wordless and contain something like a naked person emerging from a still pond, walking up the bank, and looking around, but they are some of the most beautiful shots in the movie, and not just because of the nudity, obviously, since the nudity is total and yet none of the scenes are even remotely sexy. They clearly represent a time of total sexual innocence, since they are so clearly meant to signify some type of Adam and Eve scenario. In the third scene from nature, there is a black man and a white woman walking down to the still pond that the first two scenes from nature showed them emerging from, and after catching a fish and having no idea what to do with it, they marvel at their urination function and the differences between their bodies.
From there we cut back to the present, where the rest of the movie takes place, and watch a series of people acting not nearly as sexually innocent as that man and woman were. A little more than halfway through the movie we see the woman wandering through the garden, I guess you could call it, and she comes across a statue of Jesus on the cross and then a rusted out automobile. She's fascinated by it, and then she goes around and starts eating things off of the trees which, if I know anything about the Garden of Eden, is some pretty reckless behavior. Ultimately she and the man eat off of the trees until they make themselves sick. When they wake up after being down with the sickness, their innocence has been lost, they see each other and the world differently than before, and they ultimately manage to get themselves kicked out of the Garden.
The movie cuts back and forth between modern times and this sort of ancient Garden of Eden setting, interestingly showing innocence lost in both of them in a way in which they kind of meet up at the end, and one of the characters turns out to be the filmmaker making a documentary of it all along the way. There is a powerful scene near the end of the film in which the filmmaker and his crew are traveling across a desert and, after getting into an argument about an interesting thing that they hear on the radio, they hit and kill a young boy from a tribe of blue people who evidently live in the desert. The first thing that struck me about this scene is not that it showed how this filmmaker and his crew had long since lost their innocence, but how it turned out that they were not the only ones. The movie is not about how any certain people have lost their sexual innocence or any other kind of innocence, it's about how the entire human race has lost their innocence.
Oh and here's some advice, watch the movie with the subtitles on, because it switches back and forth between various languages and is also recorded so quietly that many times you can't hear what people are saying even when they're speaking English.