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I must agree with Mr. Cranky on this one, though I would not be as generous in his rating. The problem is not the clumsy and subtle as a two-million- ton pyramid juxtaposition of the film's main threads (the unengaging life experiences of a self-centered loser named Nic, and the fall from grace of Adam and Eve), but their complete lack of relevance to each other. Let's be honest: Nic is a dick. First, he tries to rape his teenage girlfriend (okay, we all did that...), then he fucks his wife in the kitchen without seeming to notice that she'd rather chop the carrots, then he cheats on her with this other guy's girlfriend, then leaves her in the desert with a bunch of Islamic aborigines who knife her to death. Which has a lot to do with the loss of sexual innocence, I think... On the other hand, Adam and Eve come out of a lake, have fun discovering their bodies, and have sex. (Oh yeah, and there are these two twins who almost meet each other)
Is there supposed to be some kind of parallelism here?
As opposed to their biblical counterparts, nobody tells this Adam and Eve what is expected of them, like, what's right and wrong (Oops! Forgot that part...). Even if sex is inherently evil, which I have the sneaking suspicion we are supposed to believe here, nobody bothered to inform Adam and Eve about it. Furthermore, both of them seemed to be into it, and were peacefully holding each other afterwards. Suddenly, they are being chased by policemen with bloodhounds and locked out of the garden, with a huge dopey crucifix looming behind them. I hope you'll excuse me for nitpicking, but what is the message here? That sex is bad? In that case Mr. Figgis should probably cut off his penis and join a monastery instead of wasting our time. That sex is good, but that the Church (or society, etc.) is mean and wants to punish us for sexual pleasure? I believe the correct response to that is: Wow, that's an important artistic statement...NOT! And what's with the black and white thing? Doesn't it kind of dilute the symbolism by adding an extra variable - like, is it the sex that's bad, or the fact that they're mixed and having sex? It's as if Mr. Figgis is trying to compensate for the basic lack of coherence in his symbolism by adding additional layers of it, and hoping that something in there will mean something to someone. So anyway, Adam and Eve have "lost their sexual innocence," though we are not privileged to understand how this has impacted on their sense of self in any meaningful way, which is all that could possibly be interesting about a loss of innocence, except for the fact that they are incomprehensively punished for it (well, we do get to see two people doing it on film...). The moral of this tale seems to be that Adam and Eve having sex is morally equivalent to the murder of an innocent child. I don't get it. Do you?
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