6 When the releasing company tells you its film is "shockingly sensual" you can expect full frontal male nudity, which in general can be counted on to earn a film one rating grade lower than female nudity by Hollywood's strange reckoning. And when the movie's own PR suggests that the frontal male nudity here makes its forerunners in the Merchant Ivory productions (A Room with a View, Maurice) look, well, R-rated by comparison, you might wonder if this is going to be out there somewhere in the realm of the "triple-X" hard-core Caligula.

It's no Caligula, though it is farther out than the originally X-rated Last Tango In Paris (which would get an R by today's standards), and a tad beyond another ground-breaker in the genre, Sirens, reviewed here in 1994. Its closest comparative to my knowledge ever to go into general release was Spetters, the classic Dutch reworking of Saturday Night Fever. (And though I agree with Gene Siskel that "Fever" is one of the all-time greats, Spetters is even better, despite, not because of, its groundbreaking use of nudity. The videotape version I saw some years after the theatrical release—ironically, as there are no ratings for tapes—had the most potentially offensive five seconds or so cut out, so don't count on renting Spetters to see what I'm referring to.)

What special quality sets Angels and Insects and Spetters apart? How to put it politely? These two go beyond showing glimpses of male organs to making it obvious that these are male sex organs or, as one Hollywood producer said in explaining the industry's squeamishness on the topic, as potential "weapons of aggression." The close runner-up Sirens did so too, but from a safe distance, and Merchant-Ivory's Maurice did so by strong allusion, but both of the latter were, so to speak, less turgid.

Now that I've covered what you really wanted to know about Angels and Insects, what is this movie about? Not nudity in general or male nudity in particular; not even about "pushing the envelope" in filmmaking.

No, this is the film for all those people with Darwin walking fish emblems on their car rearends, and all those who sympathize with them. Though Darwinism has fallen on hard times since 1968, the first two-thirds of this movie is a paean to Darwinism, both biological and social. It looks at the insect world and shows clearly how we are all very much like insects, proving that somewhere along the line they must have been our antecedents.

We live in sophisticated anthills peopled by worker ants and even a queen ant. And in the best-organized and most efficient "hills"—in this case a lush and lavish English manor house—even the canons of ant society govern human behavior. A certain action was bad, the lead female character—the queen ant—says at this film's climax, "but it didn't feel bad." So she did it anyway, and doesn't even see any imperative to refrain from doing it again.

That's the perfect encapsulation of the Darwinian world- and lifeview of the Victorian era which rendered the 20th century one in which human beings fell a notch farther from the angels and closer to the insects. That could be an excellent story.

As in Sirens, a major figure here is a clergyman who is uncertain about where his commitment to God fits into the modern world. He starts out as someone for whom God has become a theoretical abstraction, and under the influence of the Darwinist frenzy all around him and a Darwinian entomologist who moves into his manor and marries his daughter, ends up concluding that God is now even beyond abstraction, at best an outdated creation of historical mythology.

But also like the makers of Sirens, the creative team here (Philip and Belinda Haas, working with a story by A.S. Byatt) were onto something but didn't quite know what to do with it. Two-thirds of the way through the story they turned the naturalist who logically—consistent with letting nature run its course—would have said it hardly matters who has sex with whom in this anthill, into a moralist who starts behaving like a missionary. Where this moral indignation comes from, or why, we're never given a clue. Apparently the film makers hope we'll be so distracted by their "shocking" exploitation of "sensuality" that we'll not notice their plot has fallen flatter than a failed souffle.

While not "must see," for its gorgeous cinematography and other production values, and especially its provoking lots of good questions if failing to suggest answers, I will rate it "worth seeing," at least for those not too squeamish, or willing to avert their eyes for about five minutes randomly interspersed throughout the film's last hour.