Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel begin a lifetime of troubled sexual encounters after both have sex with Candice Bergen in 1971's Carnal Knowledge. Mostly a very intelligent film thanks to a contemplative screenplay by cartoonist Jules Feiller, it nonetheless has a few gaps in its logic. Still, this is a captivating and satisfying film.
Nicholson and Garfunkel begin the film as students at Amherst College, both desperate to lose their virginity. You can hear them talking about girls over the opening credits and Feiller establishes them as especially intellectual college students entirely from how they talk about the issue. We never need to be explicitly told.
Analysis and philosophy shape their discussions of what they want and how they want to get it. When Garfunkel approaches Candice Bergen at a party, she's similarly an amateur analyst and immediately starts talking to him about the hazy separation between calculated personae and the true nature of the human heart.
But the film primarily focuses on Nicholson's character, who, when hearing how lucky Garfunkel was with Bergen, decides to start dating her, too, behind Garfunkel's back. Nicholson's character is the more emotionally withdrawn of the two and tends to be sexist in the way he talks about women and how relationship dynamics should work. Yet he's intelligent and genuinely attractive to Bergen's character as well as other women.
After college, he meets Ann-Margret who plays an actress from a TV commercial. Aside from being slightly older than him, she fulfills every criterion he's claimed to desire in a woman--a perfect body and surprisingly willing to do anything he asks. I felt like the movie could have further explored the fact that she doesn't satisfy him but it is fascinating how angry he becomes when she simply and very passively says she wants to get married and have children. This is easily the best Ann-Margret movie I've seen.
Carnal Knowledge is available on The Criterion Channel.
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