Avis des critiques

Carnal Knowledge subverted expectations of romantic dramas with its more authentic depiction of adult relationships. The sentimentality and traditional structure that hallmarked many of the most notable romantic films of the previous decade were entirely absent; Carnal Knowledge was willing to depict its characters in a less-than-favorable light.

This is not a work for those who can’t latch on to a story unless there is someone to root for... At many points, Carnal Knowledge is almost too much to bear... It’s more frightening than practically any slasher flick.

Carnal Knowledge may have once offered an immediacy in its take on shifting sexual mores, but it now comes across as quaint as its sequences set in the Truman era. Nichols's direction is reliably slick and crystalline (check out the clean lines and elegant framing of that single-take opening sequence, in which Garfunkel pursues Candice Bergen at a mixer), and there's a lot of shadowy sulking and very written-sounding brutal talk.

For one thing, Nichols directs with his usual mixture of theatricality and artiness, so that parts... are much better than the whole. For another, Feiffer's arrows, despite some neatly barbed dialogue, mostly seem to fall short of the target.

“Carnal Knowledge” is clearly Mike Nichols’ best film. It sets out to tell us certain things about these few characters and their sexual crucifixions, and it succeeds. It doesn’t go for cheap or facile laughs, or inappropriate symbolism, or a phony kind of contemporary feeling.

“Carnal Knowledge” never quite tells us as much as we want to know—backgrounds are never filled in, which is acceptable in a cartoon and disconcerting to our conceptions of real‐life cinema, no matter how stylized. This feeling of incompleteness is very much a part of what I take to be one of the more original, concerned and merciless American comedies of recent years.

[Carnal Knowledge] is a rather superficial and limited probe of American male sexual hypocrisies... The film fails by avoiding confrontation with [Nicholson's] character.