Eros, the highly anticipated triptych film, features the work of three internationally celebrated directors: Michelangelo Antonioni (L’Avventura, Blowup), Stephen Soderbergh (Sex, Lies, and Videotape), and Kar-Wai Wong (In the Mood for Love). Created to be a crowning achievement to Antonioni’s legacy as a maestro of erotic men-women portrayals, the project was jump-started when longtime Antonioni collaborator Stéphane Tschal Gadjieff decided to ask Antonioni to make a short film on the complex subject of eros. Two younger yet no less influential directors, Wong and Soderbergh, were chosen to complete the tripartite cycle, on the basis of their declared admiration for Antonioni. Each director worked independently, and as a result, each short film examines the subject at hand with his own characteristic flair.
The first segment, entitled “The Hand” and directed by Wong Kar-Wai, stars Gong Li as a tragic courtesan and Chang Chen as her tailor who hopelessly pines for her. Saturated in Wong’s characteristically nostalgic moodiness of 1960s Hong Kong, the two leads simmer with underlying unrequited sexual tension. The gorgeous cheongsams (traditional Chinese dresses) featured prominently in the film In the Mood for Love take center stage here, as Chang Chen funnels his passion for Gong Li into the decadent, tight-fitting dresses. Wong approaches the subject of eros with distinctively Chinese restraint—the most overt erotic moment we see is in an encounter near the beginning, featuring the hand alluded to by the title.
Set at a much snappier pace against the background of 1950s corporate New York, Soderbergh’s “Equilibrium” stars Robert Downey Jr. as a troubled businessman and Alan Arkin as his offbeat psychiatrist. Downey’s character suffers from recurring erotic dreams about a woman whose face he recognizes, but cannot identify upon awakening. Pressured by his wife to find out her identity—or face divorce—Downey desperately plunges into psychoanalysis. A silly sketch follows as Downey, with his eyes closed on the couch, begins to relate his dream in tantalizing detail, while Arkin counterpoints his erotic narrative with mimed comical gestures in the background to attract the attention of the lady across the office. Although this may be Soderbergh’s tongue-in-cheek jab at Woody Allen-esque obsession with psychoanalysis and eros, the script tries too hard to be funny, and on the whole fails to strike a chord about the meaning of eros, especially by the time it arrives at its disappointing conclusion.
Antonioni’s segment, entitled “The Dangerous Thread of Things,” employs his usual meandering style and high-blown philosophical rhetoric. Christopher (Christopher Buchholz) and Chloe (Regina Nemni) are an estranged couple who sulk and shout through several days of a vacation, until Christopher notices a luscious young woman on the beach. After the two indulge in the inevitable steamy sex session, the two women—both gamboling naked on the beach—meet each other in an equally sexually-charged encounter. Although the abrupt ending leaves a lot to the imagination, the graphic eroticism certainly does not—which in many ways is less sexy than Wong’s restrained study of erotic complexities.
As an inadvertent result of the directors’ different approaches, the film seems relatively disjointed and is held together only by a series of beautiful illustrations against Caetano Veloso’s haunting tune “Michelangelo Antonioni,” completing the film’s tribute to the maestro. The three segments of the film may be an allusion to Freud’s theory of the tripartite unconscious mind; but whether or not each section corresponds neatly to the id, ego, and supergo—or if it does at all—is wholly up to the audience’s interpretation.