Cinema: Spiritual Disease

In Mike Nichols' musical The Apple Tree, the biggest laugh came when the naked Adam bit the apple—and instantly snatched a towel to his loins. In a sense, all of Director Nichols' work, from Virginia Woolf to The Graduate and Catch-22, has included the same scene: knowledge precedes shame. On the surface, Nichols' new film, Carnal Knowledge, is an unfettered sexual farce. But the subtext carries the chill of fastidious puritanism: sex is dirty; touch it and you get a disease.

Here the disease is not venereal but spiritual. Its scarlet lettermen are types...

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