A documentary invites viewers into the late photographer Helmut Newton's naughty photo shoots, so everyone can enjoy the view.
In his widow's video valentine, Helmut by June, airing in April on Cinemax, the artistry of the German-born visionary is hardly demystified. Imagine his iconic erotic statuary coming to jiggly, sinewy life, and, as he says so often in the hour-long tribute, Voilà.
In 2004, a coronary event/car crash ended his eight decades of fixation on strong women. June Newton, a onetime model and photographer and now documentarian, explains that throughout those years, her husband was stuck on the imposing types that evoked the protective fräuleins of his Nazi-interrupted youth in Berlin. Well, let's just say his imagination ran beyond the maternal confines, and he is shown marching his selected Amazons to new frontiers of libidinous expression. His Teutonic coaxing leads Rachel Williams to open her lipsticked mouth around a budding rose, in an Edenic sex act. He instructs Yves Saint Laurent on how best to fondle Karen Mulder. And in a surreal scene with a string quartet, he tells Cindy Crawford, "Throw your chest out. The more chest I get, the better it will be for everybody." Indeed.
Time once called him "the king of kink," but Newton proves boyishly respectful of the nudes, as part of his obsessive quest to document their beauty. He had a kindred spirit in June, whose stately narration condones his wandering eye and celebrates their terry-clothed years in the laps of luxury. (They split their time between Monte Carlo and the Chateau Marmont.) For all his frames that revealed feminine grace in the raw, clients often kept the world from seeing all that he saw. "American women have no p*ssy, they have no nipples," Newton says in one philosophical scene. "They don't smoke. They don't drink. They don't do anything. It saddens me."
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