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T A B L E++T A L K

Circumcision: Are you foreskin or against it? Join the debate in Table Talk's Mothers

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R E C E N T L Y

The price of eggs in America
By Cynthia Joyce
Which comes first, the donor or the egg?
(03/05/98)

Second Thoughts
By Sallie Tisdale
High school doesn't need to be fixed; it needs to be reinvented
(03/04/98)

Sexual harassment law: Relax and try to enjoy it
By Laura Green
Despite its occasional excesses, sexual harassment law has improved the workplace
(03/03/98)

The silence is deafening
By Jonathan Broder
Anne Northup asks why her Democratic sisters are letting President Clinton off the hook
(03/03/98)

Giving experts the Big Slammu
By Beth Levine
No rest for the expert weary
(03/02/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

SENSUOUS FILM MOMENTS FOR THE SLEEPY | PAGE 2 OF 2

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Truly, Madly, Deeply
BY JOYCE MILLMAN

When this small British film opened in the States in 1991, more than one reviewer called it "the thinking person's 'Ghost.'" To that, I would add "the feeling person's." Written and directed by Anthony Minghella before he hit it big with "The English Patient," "Truly, Madly, Deeply" is the story of a woman named Nina (Juliet Stevenson) who grieves so much for her dead lover, a cellist named Jamie who expired suddenly and freakishly, that he comes back to her, body and soul. And when I say she grieves for him, I don't mean delicate Demi Moore teardrops, I mean great rivers of art-house film agony. In the video stores, "Truly, Madly, Deeply" is classified as a romantic comedy because after Jamie comes back, Nina starts to remember all the things about him that used to annoy her when he was alive. But before that happens, there's the beautiful, spine-tingling, strangely romantic scene when he first appears to her. She's playing something dirge-y on the piano and her house is a sad mess that seems at once stuffed with memories and achingly empty. She starts to hear Jamie's cello in her head and they play together as if he'd never gone. Then she feels his presence -- he's standing behind her, gazing at her longingly. She rises, sobbing, and buries her face into his chest and there's something about his close-eyed, surrendering silence and the way he keeps hugging her and stroking her hair that just gets me every time.

Of course, the fact that Jamie is played by Alan Rickman, the sexiest semi-unknown actor around, might have something to do with it ...

The Piano
BY KATE MOSES

"There are things I'd like to do while you play," he tells her, and a deal is struck: Each time the willfully mute, disdainful Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) pays a visit to her piano, she'll win back a key from her illiterate, tattered, Maori-tattooed neighbor, George Baines (Harvey Keitel). Baines has shrewdly traded a soggy patch of his homestead to Ada's hapless husband (Sam Neill) for the piano, but it's not clear yet what Baines is up to. Is he simply a grubby lecher looking for a grope from the newly arrived Ada? Or has he caught something important, sensed some deep current running between himself and her?

The first clue appears in the scene of their first meeting, when Ada and her little daughter have weathered their first night in New Zealand under Ada's hoop skirt, surrounded by trunks, baskets of chickens, the crated piano and curlicued shells on the surf-pounded beach. Arriving with a motley crew of Maori Sherpas, Ada's new husband -- clearly expecting a helpmeet and aghast at his mail-order bride's tininess -- whispers to Baines, "How does she look to you?" "She looks ... tired," he responds, evenly but sympathetically.

But it's not until Ada has agreed to play for her piano's return that writer-director Jane Campion allows Baines to reveal the story's heart. Alone in his shack, Baines peeks through his filmy bed curtain and watches shadow- and dust-moted light filter across the barely uncrated piano, Ada's one beloved object -- something her husband understood so little that he was ready to leave it on the beach to weather away. Rising, Baines strips off his shirt and, now nude, wipes down the piano with his shirt. It's a small, arguably unthinking act, but from Baines, via Keitel, there is meaning to it, and the meaning is clear: It is tenderness and understanding and awe that move him. He knows her the way we all ache to be known.

Tampopo
BY DWIGHT GARNER

"First, observe the whole bowl. Appreciate its gestalt, savor its aromas." These words are intoned, in Juzo Itami's giddily intense 1987 movie "Tampopo," about a steaming bowl of noodle soup. We watch as an elderly gourmand tries to teach a young turk how to eat. This isn't in itself my most sensuous film moment, but it gives you a sense of the kind of movie "Tampopo" is -- a blissfully comic "noodle western" that invites you to dig deeply into all the things (food, sex, the quest for idiosyncratic knowledge) that matter. My most sensuous film moment turned out to be, upon rewatching "Tampopo" recently, a series of three or four scenes that I'd mentally blended into one. These moments, which are disconnected from "Tampopo's" main narrative -- the film is about a 40-something woman's quixotic quest to become an expert noodle chef -- feature a Japanese gangster (Koji Yakusho) and his sweetly daring girlfriend (Fukumi Kuroda). The gangster and his cutie-pie moll devote their lives to sensual pleasure, and Itami gives us a series of moments -- they're among the best and most hilarious sex scenes ever filmed -- in which these two fuck and feast at the same time. In one scene, they pass a raw egg yolk back and forth from their mouths; in another, he turns a bowl of tender live shrimp upside down on her belly and watches as she squirms around in delight. Itami's deftly comic hand with these scenes are the antidote to those garish food-as-porn scenes in films like "9 1/2 Weeks." Kicking back and watching "Tampopo," it's impossible not to appreciate its gestalt, savor its aromas. You may even want to go fuck and feast, yourself.

The English Patient
BY SUSANNA STROMBERG

"Swoon, I'll catch you," Ralph Feinnes whispers through a window to Kristin Scott Thomas as she stands in the hot sun of the glaring Iranian desert. Around her, people are celebrating in a makeshift attempt at a European Christmas. With the lowering of her eyelids, she agrees and shortly after they are tangled in the sweaty embrace of, as he writes on a scrap of paper, "Betrayal in Iran." As the Christmas party begins to sing "Silent Night," Kristin and Ralph find each other in a darkened hallway in the stickiest, sweetest demonstration of an illicit love affair ever seen on film. Unzipping the side of her white dress, Ralph slides his hand onto her bare skin and works some kind of a magic. Kristin's eyes roll back in her head as she takes his thumb in her mouth.

Later, as she sits in a crumpled but glorious heap, Kristin's husband dressed in a Santa Claus suit, finds her. "Darling," he says, "I heard the news that you fainted. Are you pregnant?"

"No, not pregnant," she sighs. He embraces her and nuzzles her head. Then suddenly, he smells something. Panic shows in Kristin's wide, watery-blue eyes as she thinks he's discovered the scent of Ralph on her. He sniffs again, then says, "marzipan. You smell of marzipan."
SALON | March 6, 1998