Taking The Hex out of X

By RICHARD CORLISS

The new label lacks sex appeal. NC-17: it could be the license plate of the deputy attorney general of North Carolina. Instead it is the movie industry's latest code phrase, designating certain films for adults only -- no children under 17 allowed. Hollywood used to call it X.

The change in labels, announced last week by the Motion Picture Association of America, climaxes months of high-minded wrangling among filmmakers, movie reviewers and the Hollywood establishment. When Xs were handed out to such distinguished foreign films as Pedro Almodovar's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Peter Greenaway's The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover, critics and directors petitioned the M.P.A.A. to amend its system and classify certain serious fare with an A (adult) rating. Publicly, M.P.A.A. president Jack Valenti opposed any alteration, while in private he helped hammer out the compromise. This week the first NC-17 film will be released: Philip Kaufman's love quadrangle Henry & June.

The change in ratings also ends Hollywood's pretense that X does not spell pornography. In the American mind it does, which is why many newspapers refuse to carry advertising for X-rated films and most theaters and pay-cable services refuse to show them. Independent distributors had an out when they got an X: they would take the free publicity, ignore the label and release the picture unrated. That option was not open to the major studios, which are M.P.A.A. members, so they obliged directors to deliver R-rated films (in which children under 17 must be accompanied by an adult). Kaufman was the latest auteur to face an X. He has faced it down. And Hollywood, for now, has saved face.

Watching Henry & June, though, the moviegoer wonders at the controversy. One might expect sexual fireworks aplenty in the literary love story of Henry Miller (Fred Ward) and Anais Nin (Maria de Medeiros), two residents of the sex-as-art pantheon, and their put-upon spouses (Uma Thurman and Richard E. Grant). But Kaufman is a gent who dreams, ever so fastidiously, about nymphs and satyrs. And here he cannot find the moviemaking skill to suit his fine passion. His actors look stranded; with the exception of the tremulous, bewitching De Medeiros, they indulge in huff and bluster. As for the sex that got Henry & June in trouble, it's less Millerian than Victorian. There's something wrong with a sexual film when its erotic ideal, the statuesque Thurman, is kept mostly under wraps. Ironically and fatally, Henry & June lacks redeeming prurient interest.

Kaufman can feel gratified that his film will be shown as he made it. But it never should have been an X, even by the ratings board's standards. Agreeing to the new classification marks a defeat for the film -- and for provocative films to follow. Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky, a Christmas release starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich, is rumored to be cruising for an adults-only rating. The X was the forbidden zone, which strong directors could fight, sometimes successfully, to avoid. The NC-17 is different: a limbo rating. Will the board award it more freely? Will the studios declare it taboo? What if a cynical porno distributor submits his hard-core film for a rating and gets the same NC-17? Will publishers and theater owners, seeing the designation as a new euphemism for X, allow movies so rated to be advertised and exhibited? So far, nobody knows.

Just one last question: Does the new rating resolve the vexations about parental responsibility and artistic freedom? NC -- not completely.