Sex in Cinema--French Style

A funny thing happened to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing on the Avenue des Champs Elysées one fine day. As the president of France went riding along the thoroughfare that is the pride of Paris, he saw something he did not like: billboards. Never mind the ads for men's briefs and Pernod. Ça, c'est normal. But the elegance of the Champs, universally acknowledged to be the most glorious stretch of main street in the civilized (continued on page 146)Sex in Cinema-French Style(continued from page 85) world, was, Giscard noted, blemished by flagrant promotions for sexy movies--and even not-so-sexy movies--cheaply flaunting their charms from one end of the avenue to the other. Neon-rimmed bare breasts and bottoms, or thinly disguised phallic symbols--far larger than life--virtually leaped out at passers-by in shameless sidewalk pitches for such suggestively titled films as Les Valseuses, Les Seins de Glace, Les Mille et Une Nuits, Contes Immoraux and Les Couples du Bois de Boulogne (which, freely translated into English, would be Balls, Icy Breasts, 1001 Nights, Immoral Tales and Couples in the Park).

It wasn't that Giscard was a prude. What he wanted to get rid of were the sleazy billboards, not the movies they touted. Since coming to power a year ago, Giscard has--officially and personally--established a freewheeling style that recognizes France as a nation of consenting adults. Le président himself, in fact, eluded his nervous bodyguards one evening last autumn and accompanied his 20-year-old daughter to a theater showing Ken Russell's uninhibited British-made biography Mahler. And, backed by Giscard, a bill to legalize abortion in France was passed against heavy Church opposition.

In this generally permissive moral climate, the French are reasserting their historic claim to leadership in the sexual arena. Decades ago, Gay Paree was the place where one went to buy feelthy postcards and ogle seminudes at the Folies Bergère. The pornography explosion in the U. S., Denmark, Holland and Germany changed all that, and the switch was ironically dramatized early in 1973 by Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris--in which Marlon Brando, as an American expatriate, taught the erotic facts of life to Maria Schneider, as his eager pupil from the French bourgeoisie.

France today, under Giscard, is swiftly catching up with the sexual revolution and is moving faster in cinema than anywhere else. The winds of change blew up some controversial film fare even during the latter part of the late President Georges Pompidou's relatively staid regime. During 1973-1974, director Marco Ferreri's Grande Bouffe broke precedent with its outrageous black humor about four bored male hedonists (portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Ugo Tognazzi and Philippe Noiret) who decide to commit suicide by eating and fornicating ad nauseam. Next came Les Valseuses (literally, The Waltzers, though the term is French gutter argot for testicles--and was prudently changed to Going Places for English-speaking audiences), an Easy Rider kind of road movie concerning two teenaged petty-thief studs and their ready-and-willing kidnap victim (Miou-Miou), a restless beautician who has never had a satisfactory orgasm. Les Valseuses, a huge success at the box office, also offered a startling cameo by perennial French superstar Jeanne Mo-reau, as a sprung jailbird who gives the lads one night of free love before shooting herself in the vagina with a revolver. Expatriate Yugoslav director Dusan (WR--Mysteries of the Organism) Makavejev mowed down any still-standing rules of decorum with his French-Canadian Sweet Movie--a far-out political fantasy featuring urination, defecation, some tentative fellatio, pedophilia, sex in a bed of loose sugar, plus a chocolate-covered nude bathing scene. Things went so far that leading lady Carole Laure subsequently filed a lawsuit against the producers, claiming that she hadn't known quite what she had got herself into.

But that was only the beginning. "Porno is the New Wave," declared director Claude Chabrol, himself a veteran of the Nouvelle Vague group led by Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and their ilk--who dominated French cinema throughout the Sixties but have lost ground to a phenomenon known as l'époque érotique. In 1974, a banner year for erotic films in France, 15 to 20 percent of French moviegoers spent their francs to see what Americans would call a skin flick. Ask Pourquoi? and 40,000,000 Frenchmen are apt to answer with a Gallic shrug, Pourquoi pas? Maybe it's sheer escapism for a people currently in the grip of a severe economic recession, beset by inflation, strikes and gloomy forecasts of greater hardship to come.

Cherchez la femme is a facetious but familiar French answer to many a question, and the woman with the hottest clues in this case turns out to be Emmanuelle--the title of a breakthrough movie based on a best-selling book of memoirs by one Emmanuelle Arsan, nom de plume for the wife of a French diplomat stationed in Rome (say people who know). The Deep Throat of French sex movies, financially if not pornographically speaking, Emmanuelle is the most glittering money-maker in the history of le cinéma français--having earned, at last count, over $6,000,000 in France alone, while rapidly upsetting glum box-office predictions in the U. S., Japan, Australia, Finland, Brazil and Italy (where the movie was drastically re-edited by local distributors following a censorship battle, which set off yet another legal hassle).

Soft-core by U. S. standards, Emmanuelle looks as innocuous as a shampoo commercial to jaded connoisseurs of New York and Los Angeles porn. To explain its remarkable success, director Just Jaeckin, a 34-year-old former fashion photographer whose friends had warned him that beginning his career in cinema with an erotic film would mean disaster, remarks airily: "People see this film and leave without feeling guilty." They also see how a star is born in 21-year-old Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel, who fetchingly portrays Emmanuelle as the young Parisian wife of a French diplomat in Bangkok. After winning her erotic wings, so to speak, aboard an Air France jet, Emmanuelle lands amid the lush Oriental fleshpots to plumb the mysteries of lesbianism, masturbation, rape, buggery and sex à trois. The film's message appears to be liberation through subjugation (à la The Story of O), but Jaeckin speaks loudest when he is showing instead of telling it--in the early sequences, full of beautiful women beautifully photographed with vibrant sensuality and style.

Trim, energetic Yves Rousset-Rouard, prior to Emmanuelle a Madison Avenue-type producer of TV commercials, came to launch the picture in New York several months after its astonishing Paris premiere. He shed further light on the film's success: "When I first thought about producing Emmanuelle, I was not thinking about porno. I am not a sex specialist. I thought about Last Tango in Paris. I wanted to beat that--and we did. I undertook what you call motivation research. I began with a well-known book. I found a young bourgeois girl who looks quite pure, like a girl you see every day on the street in your home town. I found a young director and crew who were ambitious to prove themselves. Then we, opened at the finest theaters in Paris ... 20 theaters the same day. It was a test of strength ... and within hours, at the main theater, there were 300 people standing in a queue around the block."

Rousset-Rouard admits, however, that Emmanuelle was helped along by a stroke of fate: "When the film was finished, we presented it to the official censors, the Commission de Contrôle ... and the government said non, refused to pass Emmanuelle. A few days later, Pompidou died. When the new president was elected, he said: 'People over 21 are adults who can decide for themselves what they want to see.' Giscard is a very liberal, liberated man ... though I don't wish to discuss the president, since he's a friend of mine."

That throwaway line reveals a lot about freedom from censorship in France. Whenever a millionaire producer of erotic movies can casually claim friendship with the chief of state, he must be doing something right. Such a liaison would be unimaginable in Washington, at least since the Kennedy regime gave way to Johnson's cultural rancho, Nixon's asexual power games and President Ford's homey-folksy holding operation. Nixon as President was told by a prestigious, expensive committee of experts that no harm could be detected in the open distribution of pornography--at which he threw the rascals out and ordered a series of obscenity prosecutions (continued on page 202)Sex in Cinema-French Style(continued from page 146) that continues to this day, encouraged by a fuzzy 1973 Supreme Court decision. Giscard paid more attention to others' views, having learned from a September 1974 poll conducted by SOFRES, France's leading opinion testers, that 54 percent of the general public and 75 percent of regular moviegoers favored the easing of film-censorship laws. Almost before the ink had dried on the SOFRES report, Giscard announced that French movie censorship was finished.

Though an aide hastened to explain that the president had been referring primarily to political censorship, Giscard's subsequent deeds--both public and private--have pegged him as a man who believes in joie de vivre at whatever cost. Kennedylike, he is a fast-thinking chief executive, impatient with detail, and a bon vivant who insists that what he does after office hours is nobody's business but his own. He maintains a bachelor apartment in the Elysée Palace, official residence of French presidents, while his wife and children live elsewhere. According to the prestigious daily Le Monde, he will often disappear for an entire weekend, leaving a sealed message with members of his staff so they can locate him in case of a national emergency.

Show-business and artistic people rather than bureaucrats are known to be Giscard's preferred companions. Phrases such as Il court le jupon have appeared in print, quite literally and unequivocally suggesting that he "chases petticoats." Gossips drop the names of prominent actresses, models and at least one well-known female photographer. Such hints of potential scandal erupted into the morning news after a long night last September, when Giscard d'Estaing allegedly crashed a borrowed Maserati into a milk truck at five A.M. Despite vehement official denials of the accident, rumors persisted that the car was the property of film maker Roger Vadim--one of the most celebrated French swingers since the Marquis de Sade--and that the truck driver had gone home with a pocketful of hush money.

Whether that story's true or false, Giscard is plainly a man of the world-- one who would not find Emmanuelle's brand of eroticism too rich for his blood. In fact, 11 seconds were cut from the film--one bit snipped out of a scene depicting vaginal cigarette smoking by a night-club performer, another from a sequence in which Emmanuelle is buggered in public by the winner of a boxing match. Yet no movie has been altogether banned since the appointment of Giscard's suave minister of culture, Michel Guy, who has the final say about censorship of all films released in France, which are first submitted to the official Commission de Contrôle.

Still operative, with or without fangs, the Control Commission is an organizational maze staffed by professional film people, representatives of government ministries, provincial mayors, clergymen and behaviorologists. Of the 78 members--61 men and 17 women--90 percent are 55 or older and boast the kind of credentials that rate a listing in Who's Who. The commission's decisions have little legal force, in terms of protection against harassment. Approved films may be--and often are--challenged by local officials or even by an outraged private citizen, which leaves the French in a judicial quandary roughly comparable to the jumbo American size. A complex system of recommendations forbids some films to minors under 13, others to minors over 13--or a movie chock-full of sex and violence may be OK'd with these words of warning: Not recommended for sensitive persons (presumably meaning those of delicate sensitivity, whatever their age). In considering each work, distinctions are drawn between erotic films of discernible aesthetic quality and those the commission blithely labels la fesse au mètre, or "ass by the yard."

Taboos do exist: French sex films stay fixed in the realm of soft-core--where erect male genitals, "established penetration" and male homosexual relations are subject to a policy that might be called penis non gratis. But this, too, is changing. Male genitalia, whether rigid or flaccid, were impermissible in toto until 1969, when British director Lindsay Anderson's If ... scored a first. Thereafter, Bertrand Blier's Les Valseuses unselfconsciously let it all hang out and even implied an instance of amiable buddy-buddy rape between its male protagonists (Patrick Dewaere and Gerard Depardieu). In Vadim's newest film, La Jeune Fille Assassinée (The Murdered Girl), something that looks like a bejeweled erection is plainly visible. Vadim, a pioneer creator of sex symbols (beginning with Bardot), claims that the time is long past when frankness about love and eroticism can be considered shocking. He feels that French film makers still have a long way to go and declares himself personally "fed up with being imposed upon by producers--on no matter what subject, for no matter what reason." His Jeune Fille, starring Lui magazine cover girl Sirpa Lane opposite Vadim himself, is a sexually spiced murder mystery somewhat in the manner of Hollywood's classic Laura.

Imported porno of Deep Throat or Behind the Green Door intensity never opens in Paris and has yet to face a serious test against France's censors, who would rather delay that confrontation indefinitely. Meanwhile, both films have been shown repeatedly in an annual hard-core orgy at the Cannes Film Festival, where outright raunch from everywhere usually plays in side-street theaters to S.R.O. audiences--a practice that officialdom blinks at, since the purpose of such screenings is ostensibly private and, under festival auspices, to hustle non-French foreign buyers. Which actually means--entry limited to anyone with the price of a ticket who can fight his way to an unoccupied seat or a square foot of sitting space in the aisles.

The most hotly debated--and unresolved--censorship issue in French movie circles at present is the question of financial aid to the industry. From a 23 percent to 24 percent tax collected at the box office on every film in distribution, 14 percent of the total take goes back to movie producers for reinvestment in new productions. But Culture Minister Guy's controversial three-point program for handling screen violence and pornography proposes: (A) a radical softening of censorship for adults, (B) strict control of posters and (C) strict control of funds . . . "which benefit pornographic and violent films."

Guy argues that sex films per se are usually cheaply made and highly profitable and require no government-sanctioned tax breaks to guarantee their future. His opponents--virtually the entire movie profession--see this "economic censorship" as punitive, a measure fraught with frightful possibilities for the future. One day, they argue, there may be a more uptight Commission Control or a minister less liberal than Guy himself--one who may not discern, in cutting off Support Fund francs for porno, that a Last Tango or an Emmanuelle is appreciably different from such French ticklers as Sexually Yours, Hot Sex or How to Enjoy Being an Intelligent Cuckold.

The new erotic films have provoked some pretty volatile controversy within as well as outside the industry. Actress Marika Green, the lissome blonde who plays Emmanuelle's favorite archaeologist and sex object, reports her reception at a formal film-industry dinner: "When I arrived with a delegation from Emmanuelle, we were hissed and booed by colleagues ... which seemed to me cruel, very unprofessional. They envied our success, I suppose ... it's only human."

Trailing Emmanuelle, but generally considered miles ahead of it aesthetically, Polish-born director Walerian Borowczyk's Immoral Tales is a box-office hit as well as the most critically acclaimed and significant French-language sex film since Luis Buñuel's 1930 milestone of erotica, L'Age d'Or. This rich, ritualistic four-part movie treats lewdness like excerpts from the Oxford Classics. Following an amusing introductory display of pornographic objets d'art, the action begins with a Tale in which, at an isolated shore, a 20-year-old hero teaches his 16-year-old cousin to give head, timing his climax mystically with the incoming tide. What follows are a teenage masturbation fantasy, a 17th Century lesbian orgy staged by an evil countess (played by Paloma Picasso, daughter of the Picasso) who bathes in the blood of virgins, plus an incredible showpiece about Lucrezia Borgia--who gives birth to a child conceived during an unholy sexual union with her father, Pope Alexander VI, and her brother the bishop.

Religion, generally considered a risky topic by the best U. S. pornographers, appears to be fair game among film makers in Catholic France. The prevailing attitude is summed up by André Pieyre de Mandiargues, a highly esteemed author who wrote the porno short prefacing Immoral Tales: "To shock is as modern today as to preach at the time of the Crusades." (It may be relevant--and it's certainly piquant--that within the past year or so, the French press has chortled over two savory scandals involving churchmen. First a 69-year-old Catholic cardinal was found dead in a night-club dancer's apartment, then a 57-year-old bishop died of apparent heart failure in a hotel frequented by prostitutes.)

The current success in Paris of Buñuel's racy, brilliant Le Fantôme de la Liberté must be more than mere coincidence. Recognized throughout the world as one of cinema's great social satirists, the 75-year-old Buñuel turns all the rules of civilized behavior upside down in Le Fantôme, with irreverence the keynote of a scene about a group of lewd traveling monks--who repair to a young lady's room at an inn to play poker, using religious medals for chips. The film's sexy shticks are even funnier and a natural extension of Buñuel's lifelong battle with holier-than-thou authoritarianism. Says he, "Sexual pleasure for me is directly linked with the idea of sin and exists only in a religious context. ... Sex without religion is like an egg without salt."

Another of the recent outrageous entries, Grandeur Nature (Life-Size Doll), offered no offense to piety but carried automation a bit beyond some critics' acceptable bounds. Balding, late-40ish Michel Piccoli--who might sooner pass for a shoe salesman or a bank teller than for the major French star and hardworking sex symbol he happens to be--played a man with a fix on an amazingly realistic female mannequin that could, and did, satisfy his every need.

The naughty New Wave of French cinema is bound to meet opposition, and some of the loudest dissenting voices suggest that all this sexual hanky-panky may just be the opiate of the masses, seductively disguised. Georges Séguy, influential chief of the Communist labor unions, declares: "Degradation of morals in books, the press and in films leads to fascism... We, therefore, must fight against it."

Séguy is answered by film maker--author Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote Last Year at Marienbad before picking up a megaphone himself. Robbe-Grillet's recent movies, in the opinion of his detractors, have become less and less artistic as they have become more and more erotic. His 1974 Glissements Progressifs du Plaisir (Gradual Glidings of Pleasure) was followed this year by Le Jeu avec le Feu (Playing with Fire), with Jean-Louis Trintignant, Anicée Alvina and Emmanuelle's Sylvia Kristel in the kinky story of a banker's daughter who is kidnaped and taken to a brothel where wealthy clients indulge their favorite fantasies--in a Gothic room, a torture chamber, a nun's cell, etc. Erotic films, to Robbe-Grillet, mark "the slow but certain rise of a new generation," and he mocks the orthodox left (Communist or otherwise) for its closet puritanism: "As far as the flesh is concerned, if it is not sanctified by the class struggle, then it remains subjected to a kind of condescending smile which we must call censorship."

Pleasure is his business, insists Robbe-Grillet, in effect scorning militants of any movement: "I was reproached for having hired good-looking girls as actresses. It seems this is phallocratism. To please women's lib, one would have to choose women as unattractive as possible and photograph their faces and bodies in such a way as to make them outright horrible: That would be feminism! What a funny thing."

Masculine or feminine, beautiful or merely passable, young or old, star or superstar, few French film actors show deep reluctance to shed their clothes and inhibitions for an important role. Romy Schneider, one of the most luminous sex goddesses of the moment, resurrected her sagging career to become one of France's box-office champions as a svelte seductress. Romy has made five films in ten months--ranging from the murderous black comedy Le Trio Infernal (with Michel Piccoli) to the romantic drama of L'Important C'est d'Aimer (The Important Thing Is to Love)--and seldom gets through the last reel without a nude scene. Such big-name performers as Alain Delon and Annie Girardot don't quibble about total nudity for a romp at the beach in a psychological thriller called Shock Treatment--which can be roughly compared to an American movie with, say, Paul Newman and Shirley MacLaine cavorting tout nu just for the hell of it.

In Bardot country, as everywhere else, sex appeal in some degree has always been the sine qua non of screen stardom. Mireille Darc (Delon's offscreen inamorata as well as his co-star in Icy Breasts) is France's favorite blonde--whose evening gown with a peekaboo derrière was a highlight of the hit comedy The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe and its sequel, Le Retour du Grand Blond. Nathalie Delon (Alain's former wife) makes nudity a habit in such steamy gambols as The Monk and Vous Intéres-sez-vous à la Chose? (Are You Interested in It?). Though glamorous Catherine Deneuve depends on sheer beauty (and those Chanel ads) rather than sexual exhibitionism to stay on top of the heap, l'époque érotique nonetheless makes demands. To publicize Zig-Zig (the title taken from the word GIs used during World War Two to ask mesdemoiselles for a lay)--in which she is teamed with Bernadette Lafont as a night-club songbird and occasional hooker--Deneuve posed for journalists in Pigalle in front of Esmeralda's Erotic Saloon, a local den of iniquity where parts of Zig-Zig were shot.

Among the relative newcomers who have learned that a bit of timely stripping may augment their acting talent to advantage are ambitious, exquisite fashion model Aurore Clément (the most promising new face in Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien) and petite Brigitte Ariel (who went from the title role of La Môme Piaf into Otto Preminger's Rosebud). Both are probably happier with their lot than Anne Libert, known to a coterie of admirers as "the Bardot of porno," is with hers. Anne's list of softcore film credits reads like a month-long orgy and hardly requires precise translation: Sex a la Barre, Les Ardentes, Club Privé, Bananes Mécaniques, Le Rallye des Joyeuses and Les Expériences Erotiques de Frankenstein. "There is not a single one I am proud to have made," Anne declares vehemently. "Those who make them are known directors who change their names to shoot films of bad quality. Sometime I'd like to ask: Shouldn't we actors change our names, too, when we play in your films? I dream, finally, of acting in an erotic film which wouldn't be only a pretext for exhibiting a naked girl in all positions. To make love really is not so photogenic ... and they use 'specialists' for the most daring scenes, the same people who pose for the obscene photographs sold in Pigalle."

An Italian starlet in Paris echoes Anne's sentiments about the briefcase-and-raincoat crowd in a few well-chosen words that actors from Montmartre to Sausalito would undoubtedly drink to: "I can play in the nude if it is necessary for the movie ... but not if it is only necessary for the man sitting alone in a theater."

Dark-eyed, articulate Anny Duperey, a rising stage-and-screen actress cast opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo in Stavisky, takes a somewhat stronger stand. "Many directors now feel compelled to include a sex scene, necessary or not. This trend is a catastrophe for cinema. If Emmanuelle were good, all right. But because it's a bad film, its success is a little unnerving. I do not speak from prudishness. I feel very differently about Contes Immoraux, which is very sensual ... more than sexy, with a sense of flesh. You can see it, feel it."

Every discussion of cinematic sex is reduced at last to terms of quality: While bad-to-mediocre taste should not be suppressed, most people in the industry agree, good taste is better. Director Michel Drach, who scored an international hit with his tender, non-erotic Les Violons du Bal, has been polishing up a new movie titled Parlez-moi d'Amour. Drach's femme star in this story of a teenaged boy's awakening is ample Andrea Ferreol, who will appear nude--in her most expansive display of voluptuousness since she separated the men from the boys in La Grande Bouffe. "Mine is not an erotic film, however," says Drach. "Perhaps I would make one sometime, because sex is an important part of life. But no porno, which has become an obsession here. Today every French movie begins with removing a pair of trousers, yet there's no genuine erotic sensibility. You see famous actresses over 40 tearing off their clothes, doing incredible things. If you copy that fashion, you become unfashionable in one year. And the real French porno is so sad ... you sleep, zzzzzzzz."

Whether le sexy cinema will go from wicked to worse or on to bigger and better things, no one can say for sure. But no one can call the French quitters. "The wave will grow, because it's the first time we have had a climate so permissive," says director Michel Mitrani, whose Guichets du Louvre (Black Thursday in the U. S.) is a sensitive World War Two reminiscence that places him well outside the ranks of porno peddlers. "So many people are going to erotic movies, it is worrisome. Right now they are attracted by eroticism ... perhaps tomorrow they will want violence, the next day, politics."

Meanwhile, Emmanuelle director Jaeckin is well into The Story of O, an expensively produced version of the definitive sadomasochistic novel, which will introduce delectable Corinne Cléry, former model, as a brand-new candidate for sex stardom. Jaeckin sounds untroubled by second thoughts about the avalanche of erotica he helped unleash: "Pornography, for me, signifies vulgarity. I watched ten minutes of Deep Throat. This kind of film bores me. Emmanuelle is absolutely a film érotique.... Though I regret it was not a stronger story, there's not a single pornographic scene." What does Jaeckin call pornographic? He defines his terms pungently: "There are things very beautiful and things very ugly--a fart can be pornographic, a fart cannot be erotic. Story of O is a true histoire d'amour. I dream of discovering an O in my life.... I would be madly in love with a woman identical to her, capable of giving herself thus, with such passion."

Militant feminists might raise an eyebrow at that, though women have been known to change their minds. Sylvia Kristel, widely quoted as declaring she'd made her first and last excursion into erotica ("What can you do for an encore after Emmanuelle? Besides, erotic films are boring"), will definitely appear in a sequel titled L'Anti-Vierge (Anti-Virgin). About to begin under the direction of glamor photographer Francis Giacobetti, L'Anti-Vierge will describe Emmanuelle's attempts to share her own high-level sexual vibes with a novice.

Le Chaud Lapin (The Hot Rabbit)-- a new release by youthful director Pascal Thomas--stars gangly, hawk-nosed Bernard Menez as an awkward seducer who tries to make it with all the proper women at his best friend's country house, finally strips himself naked in despair and runs off to wind up his vacation in the company of three hippie demoiselles. Zouzou, star of Eric Rohmer's prestigious Chloé in the Afternoon, is slated for a comedy called Les Lolos de Lola (Lola's Boobs is probably the closest English equivalent--as well as a clear indication of the direction of things since Claire's Knee). And as soon as he finds time, indefatigable Michel Piccoli plans to commit a few more cardinal sins in director Francis (Le Trio Infernal) Girod's Diable en Soutane--or Devil in a Cassock--playing a priest with a weakness for thievery, fornication and murder.

There are apt to be new surprises stemming from the second liberation of Paris. There's also reason to hope that inbred French elegance, free of former restraints, will ultimately have a positive influence on serious film makers everywhere. France's boom of eroticism could become a force majeure working to narrow the aesthetic gap between the tackiest hard-core porno and mature, exciting, intelligent movies in which performers won't always have to grab for the bedcovers at the mere mention of s-e-x.