Innocence

The New York Times reviewer of Innocence surprises: "the line between cinematic art and exploitation has rarely seemed finer and nervier", s/he says.

Boulverse, I read on. The images that the reviewer finds troubling are "shots of the girls' legs, those peek-a-boo moments when the camera all but noses under their skirts"; and... small girls in underwear.

A total and absolute mystery.

Peek-a-boo moments? Really?

Nosing under skirts? When? Where?

And then: ten year old children in underwear -- sexy? Does the reviewer have a particularly hairy mind or am I particularly sexually unaware?

But the critique should not surprise; it is wholly and typically American, of course: to the American mind everything seems to carry sexual intent. (They read Lolita in America, don't they?)

It must be very tiring to have such an oversexed mind.

But then, suddenly, there comes a twist: the reviewer closes by recommending a film entitled Fast Times At Ridgemont High as a better alternative to Innocence. It is a better movie, s/he says, because in it "girls have bodies and boys".

I suppose girls having sex is OK, then. And if so, what exactly is the problem with Innocence? Girls not having sex?

I am confused.

The point of the film which the critic so vehemently attacks is actually spelled out in capital letters in the title (for the benefit of the attention deficit disordered): the movie is not about fast times; it is about the time before we even begin to suspect that such a thing as a fast time might exist. It is about beginning to suspect that there are things we do not know. Beginning to suspect and perhaps even beginning to ask, hesitantly and half-heartedly about those suspected things, yet being still prepared to accept "later", "not now", and "forbidden" as final answers.

A reviewer on IMDB puts it like this:

"William Blakes collection of poems on innocence and experience charts the replacing of the former with the latter. He shows us how innocence cannot be appreciated til you are experienced, but how experience completely taints any notion of innocence, and the same is with this precise film."

There is a kind of saudade here, a hopeless longing for the irretrievably lost innocence of the past.

But saudade is not an American emotion anymore perhaps than innocence.

*

Innocence, by the way, is a very beautiful film. I watched it to the end and then hit the play button and watched it all over again.

I was not sexually stimulated.