(1990) Based on portions of Anais Nin's diaries, which she published after everyone else had died, director Philip Kaufman's beautifully photographed, NC-17-rated biopic is probably too artsy-fartsy for the likes of gritty, down-to-earth Henry Miller (though the naked scenes of sex would have been appealing), but Nin preferred the abstract and poetic.

In 1931 finding a closet full of salacious photographs in a Parisian apartment where she and her American husband Hugo (Richard E. Grant) take up temporary residence, Anais Nin (Maria de Medeiros), while writing a book in defense of D.H. Lawrence's sensual stories, contemplates the "endless varieties of erotic experience" in her diary, which supplies the cinematic scenes: "I tell Hugo only part of the story."

As a banker, Hugo makes a good living for Anais and himself, though she complains that banking has changed him into someone else. The couple becomes acquainted with the yet-to-be-published American writer Henry Miller (Fred Ward) through Richard Osborn (Kevin Spacey), a copyright lawyer and mutual friend.

Dismissing Lawrence's writing as "childish" and "prudish" when his own stories are favorably compared to the late novelist, Miller says of his own effort: "I'm writing about self-liberation." Initially attracted to Miller's virility - "He's a man life intoxicates" - Anais will later denigrate him as "rough," a "parasitic egoist" without compassion. Yet the attraction/repulsion will oscillate throughout as they osculate and fornicate.

Henry tells Anais about his prevaricating, Brooklyn-born wife June (Uma Thurman), their relationship with Jean, an artist June brought home, and Pop, a patron saint of the arts. Hugo, who loves and trusts his wife, expresses a hint of mild anxiety: "You fall in love with people's minds."

Henry introduces Anais to June, an uninhibited inveigler who says: "Henry gets everything wrong." Critical of Henry for "making things ugly" in his fiction (especially in his depiction of her), June ventilates: "Beauty is a joke to you." In June's company, Anais says to the tantalizing temptress: "I want to experience everything you've experienced"; but June, puppeteer and manipulator, soon departs for New York in hopes of becoming an actress.

Henry's lust vulgarizes Anais, yet she feels pure and stronger after their love making. Reading her analysis of Lawrence, Henry realizes the writer's effort to liberate literature; she allows only Henry to see portions of her diary. She goes to movies with Henry, seeing The Passion of Joan of Arc and the surrealistic Un Chien Andalou.

Restless, spirited, adventurous, Anais wanders through the art students' ball among the naked, painted, masked revelers where she's ravished. Osborn claims that Henry stole everything from him, including a manuscript of a novel. Comic magicians and female contortionists perform on the margins of a circus of sex: Hugo and Anais pay to watch two women perform a sexual exhibition. Her lover Eduardo cautions Anais: "Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones."

Henry completes his novel Tropic of Cancer, telling Anais that composing it was a way of understanding June to get free of her. In her work, House of Incest, Anais has based her character Sabina on June, who returns after disappointments in America. A publisher's offer of "a crummy five percent" remuneration for the novel isn't fair compensation after all the work Henry's put into its writing, June argues, besides it isn't ready because it contains too much anger.

She accuses Anais of being "cruel and clever," discounting either's profession of love as nothing more than a desire for experience about which to write: "You stole everything." In leaving Henry, she says she's giving him his last chapter.

Tropic of Cancer, published in 1934, was banned in the US as obscene for another 27 years.

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