Ricardo Santos Mike Figgis is a gifted director, but he is capable of the best and the worst, and no one can foresee how his next film will be like. From my point of view, his best feature up to day is "The Browning version". He has also made good films ("Stormy Monday", "Leaving Las Vegas") but sometimes he plummets into the hollow ("One night stand"), the commercial ("Mr. Jones") or watches himself for almost two hours ("The Loss of sexual innocence"). Maybe inspired by Kieslowsky, this film lacks the depth of the polish master, and is a boring collection of images supposed to be related with the awakening of the being, or the sexual self-consciousness, or whatever was roaming into the director's mind.

tedg Spoilers herein.Thank god for Mike Figgis. There are more clever directors, and others more intelligent. But no one quite as obsessed with the structure of the narrative as visual music. Some of his other experiments play with folding in other ways; here we get an adventure in parallel narratives at different levels of abstraction.Some reach toward the archetypical, others toward the personal, all very much like `Singing Detective' which it resembles in several ways. Nothing in it struck me solidly until the surprise at the end where Adam and Eve exit the garden to paparazzi and news cameras.Endings are always problematic for experiments where the form is not well established, because so much depends on what we expect. This ending saved the whole project for me. Rugged. Completely transformed all that went before.That's because he treats the whole thing until that point as music: starting with a pure theme, embellishing with variations in several parallel threads, then abruptly shifting from musical noodling to cinematic plunge. That plunge of us INTO the film at long last is his (and his archetypes) exit OUT OF the film into the unkind space that surrounds music.Some films are structured this way, where the entire film is merely preparation, setup, for the end. I know of none other that uses music as the distraction while doing this.Ted's evaluation: 3 of 3 – Worth watching.

steelsniper This movie tries WAY too hard to be artistic. the story is imbedded underneath so much confusion and symbology that its hard to tell what the director is trying to say.its as if the writers took 50 scenes and threw them into the air, and picked them up randomly, and that was the movie. the scenes look as if the editors didnt know how to cut a scene.nothing happens. dont waste your time. this is a 1/10 movie. the director is NOT an artist, but he definately wants to be one. he failed. he should not make any more movies. the end

surrealkitten Julian Sands is well labeled as the Muse of director Mike Figgis. After no less than three films where Figgis has successfully coaxed the best performances out of this fine, sadly underapreciated actor, one begins to see an almost DeNiro/Scorsesian reparte' between the two artists. The film itself is quirky, breathless, passionate British celluloid at its most honest, and any project that can make even the bricky, fish-eyed Saffron Burrows look exciting is a success in more ways than one.