E-Mail This Article to a Friend Not so hot Auteurs fail to score in Eros BY GERALD PEARY

There must be earlier examples, but the first anthology film that comes to my mind is Dead of Night (1945), in which four British directors divvied up six horror short tales. For Trio (1950), two filmmakers adapted three Somerset Maugham stories. There’s a lull until the 1960s, when a Europe bursting with "auteurs" gave the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Federico Fellini chances to shoot short in L’amour à vingt ans/Love at Twenty (1962), Les sept péchés capiteaux/The Seven Deadly Sins (1962), Far from Vietnam (1967), and Spirits of the Dead (1968). America came along with 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie (Seven Spielberg, John Landis, George Miller), 1989’s New York Stories (Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen), and 1995’s Four Rooms (Quentin Tarantino, Allison Anders, Robert Rodriguez, Alexandre Rockwell).

Is the anthology picture a place for goofing and slumming? There’s not a film above that’s even 50-50 for good sections versus bad, and the results can be 100 percent disastrous, as was the case with Four Rooms. I recall only three really first-rate sequences in all the anthology films I’ve watched: the malevolent ventriloquist’s-dummy scene from Dead of Night; Truffaut’s "Antoine et Colette," a poignant story of unrequited heart pounding, from L’amour à vingt ans; and Scorsese’s overlooked "Life Lessons," with Nick Nolte as a womanizing painter, in New York Stories. Here we go again with Eros (at the Kendall Square), for which Wong Kar-wai, Steven Soderbergh, and Michelangelo Antonioni were given cozy budgets and charged to make erotic shorts. Wouldn’t it be lovely to report three smashing shorts?

Sorry, this anthology is the usual mish-mash, more mediocre than good, though there’s a lot to savor in the Wong Kar-wai and limited pleasures in the Soderbergh. As for the Antonioni: it’s noble that at 92, the cinéaste of L’avventura and Blow-Up still makes movies, though after a stroke, he’s wheelchair-bound and can’t speak. But his contribution to Eros is silly and offputting, an unneeded coda to his sublime career.

Shot exquisitely by super cinematographer Chris Doyle, with soft-focus intimacy, Wong’s "The Hand" tells of the downward spiral of a beautiful courtesan, Miss Hua (no first name), and of Zhang (Chen Chang), the man who loves her, mostly from afar. Their first meeting is as sexually direct as it ever gets between them. He’s a virginal tailor’s assistant who appears at her apartment to pick up some clothes. He waits at her dining table, listening to her lurid orgasm through the wall. When he’s let in to see her, Miss Hua is still horny. She orders him to remove his pants, cuddles his behind, and masturbates him. The hand!

Wong’s film moves quickly through the years, as Zhang, now a fully-fledged tailor, keeps arriving at her apartment and listening in as she flirts on the phone with her bevy of wealthy paramours. Then the lovers abandon her, and Miss Hua, moved to a flophouse hotel, is reduced to hooking at the waterfront. She becomes sick and delirious, and yet there’s Zhang at her bedside, like young Robert Taylor by the consumptive Greta Garbo in Camille (1936). "The Hand" moves from prime Wong, delicate and tender, to clunky and mushy. Throughout, Gong Li is glorious as the unfortunate Miss Hua.

Set in the 1950s, Soderbergh’s "Equilibrium" concerns a visit to a psychiatrist (Alan Arkin) by a frenetic businessman (Robert Downey Jr.) who says he’s lost his equilibrium, being beset by a recurring dream of a gorgeous woman in a tub. Shot in black-and-white, this short includes a funny send-up of "film noir" lighting and an engagingly ditsy performance by Downey. It breaks down with an endless joke in which Arkin’s distracted shrink keeps looking out a window with binoculars while Downey explains his problematic life.

Antonioni’s "Il filo pericolo delle cose"/"The Dangerous Thread of Things" follows two rich, spoiled lovers (Christopher Buchholz and Regina Nemni) as they quarrel while walking through the countryside by an ocean. The dialogue is stilted, their alienation annoying. Why should we care about this couple? Out of nowhere, the guy climbs into a tower apartment and has sex with a well-endowed nature girl (Luisa Ranieri). Then he leaves for snowy Paris, and both women dance naked by the beach. Does this nudie stuff justify the movie’s title, Eros? No way. There’s only one erotically charged scene in the whole picture: Gong Li caressing a young man’s tush, giving a hand job.