Eros

This triptych of films by three master filmmakers is a disappointment. Supposedly an exploration of love—erotic love, desire—Eros (2004) is neither erotic nor interesting. The opening segment, “The Hand,” directed by Wong Kar Wai, narrates the life-long relationship of a modern-day courtesan and the tailor who makes her clothes. He is dedicated to her for a favor she did for him (alluded to in the title) when they first met. He is obsessed with her, despite her disdain for him and her general arrogance and cruelty. The obsession is difficult to understand. This is the best-made segment in the film.

Next is Steven Soderbergh’s “Equilibrium,” set in 1955, in which Robert Downey seeks help from psychoanalyst Alan Arkin for his recurrent dreams about a beautiful woman whom he is sleeping with in the dream but whom he cannot identify. The segment takes place almost entirely in he psychoanalyst’s office, and throughout much of the session, while Downey lies on the couch, Arkin stares out the window, often with a pair of binoculars, apparently at a woman whom he knows in a nearby building. This is one of those narratives where you’re never certain of the difference between the dream world and the real one—elements of each keep invading the other. If anything, this segment satirizes the age of psychoanalysis, when the psychoanalyst was the potential solution to all problems. This piece is interesting and fun to watch but ultimately of little consequence, though Arkin was excellent.

Finally there is Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Dangerous Thread of Things,” about a young couple in the process of breaking up. The poetry of Antonioni’s greatest films is barely evident here. On the one hand this segment comes the closest of the three to fulfilling the promise of the title—in the sense that it does directly concern love and sex--but on the other it is turgid, meandering, and meaninglessly portentous.

Films like this one rarely work. The whole is usually less than the sum of its parts, or one part so wholly overshadows the others that imbalance and asymmetry result.

Eros in our society has been reduced and trivialized. The mythos is gone. This film and its three distinguished directors do not restore it.