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Very best movie i ever watch

Good movie but grossly overrated

A Masterpiece!

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This movie shows us two male friends from college age to maturity and their relationships with women. Art Garfunkel as Jonathan and Jack Nicholson as Sandy are good friends with very different personalities who share a healthy libido focused on women, particularly Candace Bergen as Susan. The opening scene shows the two men attending a low-key social, with 1940's jazz music playing, where Sandy urges Jonathan to make a move towards Susan, the only other girl there. Susan soon becomes friends with Jonathan but also dates Sandy. Both benefit from sexual encounters with her. The story uses a visual technique that makes the viewer feel like a voyeur watching their private conversations and encounters with women. Often filmed in the dark with the characters close-up to the camera, the movie kept my attention. Jonathan is the "sensitive guy" who women supposedly prefer so Sandy uses some of his honest conversational style to win over Susan. Later in their lives, we find Jonathan married to Cindi, played by Cynthia O'Neil, and passingly happy. Sandy is facing a mid-life crisis as his girlfriend, played by Ann-Margret asks him to marry. Sandy looks at women as if they have to attain certain physical standards, a few more inches here, a bit less somewhere else, as if choosing a partner is like picking a good cut of meat. The nudity is explicit by the standards of 1971. The film is not prudish in dealing with sexuality. We see shower scenes with people getting dressed and undressed as common as lighting up a cigarette. The movie has a certain European feel with scenes standing as little vignettes. One scene shows two women sitting on a bench watching a tennis match with neither speaking a word until both leave and we see the image of a lonely bench. Not an upbeat movie, it is an impressive piece of film-making about sexuality in the 1970's.

This movie attracts quite a lot of admiration here which puzzles me. It is a kind of summation of the awfulness of the sixties sexual revolution - its sourness, acute misogyny, deep unhappiness and disconnect. The two male protagonists, well played by Nicholson and Garfunkel, though their roles are really nothing but stereotypes, are equally unsympathetic, self obsessed, selfish, duplicitous and vain, while the women are just there as sex objects. It's a deeply depressing movie. The film has dated badly, as one would expect, and with such a bleak message it's hard to see why anybody except an admirer of the lead actors would bother with it today.

The sixties were a time when nearly every boundary was tested. In the seventies we began to learn that boundaries don't necessarily restrict freedom but exist to provide elasticity which stretched too thin too fast can break. Carnal Knowledge follows two buddies through their college years and into middle age a period during which the sexual revolution swept many not into a new land of liberation but to a world of sexual dysfunction, misogyny, and oppression. Jack Nicholson is terrific as man who became a callous, self-centered product of the revolution. Art Garfunkel, in a stiff and uninteresting performance, is Nicholson's erudite buddy. Directed by Mike Nichols, the movie lacks the wit of "The Graduate" and Jules Feiffer's script is leaden without a hint of irony that could elevate the film from tolerable to entertaining. Carnal Knowledge is a curio of late sixties/early seventies film-making that captures, depressingly, the underside of the '60s sexual revolution. Perhaps a wittier, lighter touch would have made this a classic.

Nearly forty years ago this film felt almost horrifying to me, watching today it just seems depressing. The picture is an indictment of the entire 'the more we have, the more we want' mentality that ultimately leads to 'the more we get, the less we have' outcome. As the picture reveals, it probably takes a two or three decade span of failed relationships to figure all that out, even with the right role models in place. This review comes right in the middle of the tragic Tiger Woods extra-marital affair fiasco, and I ask myself if Woods would have learned anything if he had seen this picture earlier in his career. I don't think so.With the benefit of hindsight, "Carnal Knowledge" excels in portraying how things used to be back in those awkward days before everyone was forced to grow up before the age of ten or so. Today everyone has a cell phone, but there was a time when an entire floor of a women's college dorm had to share one. It would be virtually impossible today for Sandy (Art Garfunkel) to be unaware of Jonathan's (Jack Nicholson) involvement with Susan (Candice Bergen); somebody would have caught them on camera and posted it on the internet. So in that respect, the film is undeniably dated. Yet for it's time, the picture was a landmark in exploring the consequences of love and lust in a way that furthered a breakdown in the once traditional values of fidelity and morality. Today, I believe that liberal mission is almost complete.Interesting the way Nicholson took so many showers in the story. He always did it right after bedding down a conquest. It felt like he was attempting to subliminally wash away the grime of his own creepy existence. Moving in on your best friend's girl puts you in a special class of heel I think, and I surmise that Sandy 'got it' when Jonathan unceremoniously dismissed Susan in his apartment slide show. Wouldn't it have been great to see a scene between Jonathan and Sandy of the same magnitude as when Jonathan went off on Bobbie (Ann-Margret). It would have been good to see Sandy grow a pair to blow off twenty years worth of steam over the deception of a college buddy. But then again, Sandy was entranced by the ever wise, ever knowing new eighteen year old girlfriend. It's a good thing Carol Kane didn't have a speaking part.I'm curious today how Art Garfunkel wound up in the film opposite Jack Nicholson. That casting decision still eludes me, as his screen credits before and since have been scattered and somewhat eclectic. Nicholson, Bergen and Ann-Margret all received a boost of recognition with the commercial success of the film at the time as far as I can recall. It would be interesting to hear their thoughts about the picture and their roles in it with the perspective of nearly forty years gone by.