A tawdry failure to live up to its grandiosely undelimited title

"Eros" (2004) combines a mildly entertaining black-and-white short sarcastically titled "Equilibirum" by Steven Soderberg involving Nick (Robert Downey, Jr.), as a troubled 1950s New York advertising executive with a recurrent dream about a woman in a bathtub and Alan Arkin as a psychoanalyst (Dr. Pearl) who is more interested in whoever is across the street than in his patient (even using binoculars to peep while his patient blathers), a vapid nudity-heavy sketch by Michelangelo Antonioni ("The Dangerous Thread of Things") showing an estranged couple (Regina Nemni and Christopher Buchholz) on the Italian Riviera (more or less of the present) with the husband having an affair with a younger woman played by Luisa Rainieri(though, not for the first time, Antonioni seems more interested in the landscape than in the Failure to Communicate among human beings), and, in the most substantial part, "The Hand," Wong Kar-Wai shows an aim-inhibited assistant dressmaker (Chen Chang, the ardent Mongol leader "Dark Cloud: from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, "The Hand" has more than a little of that film's sexual repression.)

All three movies have considerably more style than substance. "The Hand," set in in 1960s Hong Kong, as Wong's In the Mood for Love was) provides the only eroticism in the movie, and also has a simulation of a sexual act: a dominance-and-submission humiliation of the sexually inexperienced man by the bored, high-paid prostitute paid by Miss Huang (Li Gong). She wants to make him obsessed with her--ostensibly so he will make great dresses for her, though boredom and a wish to remind herself of her power over men seem more operative to my (perhaps cynical) view. She gets whatever she wants from him (and more?), but it's all very sad--which is a lot better than being embarassingly dull and exploitative (of both the actresses) , as the Antonioni contribution to "Eros" is.

The DVD also includes a wordless 17-minute record of Antonioni looking at and touching the work of the more famous Michelangelo in San Pietro di Vicolo, particularly the statue of Moses. With music by Pergolesi and Palestrina, I like this bonus feature considerably more than Antonioni's chapter in the tripartite film. Maybe as many as 3.5 stars for Wong's part, nearly 3 for Soderbergh's, less than 2 for Antonioni's (1 for Rainieri's dance of postcoital joy), and 3.5 for the trip to Vicolo.

To put it mildly, I received no new insights into eros from any of the three films--indeed there was sex and nudity in Antonioni's, but nothing that seemed erotic to me. Ditto for Nick's babbling and Dr. Pearl's window-peeping.


(Pedro Almodovar was originally supposed to participate, but his script seems to have run afoul of Chinese censors and he was replaced by Soderbergh. Chen also appeared in Wong's "2046" BTW. )