Sex in Cinema 1988

while blockbusters cop out with a blink and a wink, movies about the good, bad old days deliver blasts from the past

Last year at this time, pessimists were predicting that the AIDS scare would bring carnal knowledge on the screen to a screeching halt. They were only partly right. Moviemakers, as ingenious as ever, found a couple of ways to keep the screen sizzling: They played sex loose and light in such comedies as Coming to America, Bull Durham, Moon over Parador and A Fish Called Wanda—and they set most of their hottest plots (White Mischief, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Moderns) safely in the past, when "doing it" didn't require a warning label. Moviemakers who treat sexual freedom as nostalgia may really be focusing on the bottom line. Audiences are getting older. No less a figure than Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, has stated that filmgoers over 40 are the wave of the future. "The movie world," he said, "need no longer be girdled round by boundaries set by the very young."

Valenti might well have been talking about The Unbearable Lightness of Being, director Philip Kaufman's stunning, critically hailed drama based on a best seller by Czech novelist Milan Kundera. "It rekindles the sparks of adult sexuality on the American screen," wrote Time's Richard Corliss. TV's Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert concurred, hailing it, respectively, as "a rare epic" and "the most erotic serious film since Last Tango in Paris." The excitement stemmed from a complex tale of love, politics and infidelity set before and after the "Prague spring" of 1968, a period suffused with the Czech equivalent of glasnost, which ended with a Russian invasion. Made in English but with a (text continued on page 142) decidedly east European flavor, Being stars England's versatile Daniel Day-Lewis as a young surgeon who's an incorrigible womanizer. "Take off your clothes" is the doctor's usual way of warming up a friendship, in or out of his examining room, and nearly everyone does. Eventually, the hero loses both his political and his sexual freedom through relationships with two remarkable women—his mistress (Sweden's Lena Olin) and his wife (France's Juliette Binoche). The movie's provocative highlight is a scene in which the two women photograph each other nude, their rivalry sublimated in a tantalizing charade.

There were minority opinions about Kaufman's vivid intellectual foray into sex and politics. One came from a Playboy reader who wrote to say that the movie should have been called The Unbearable Lightness of Boring, adding that his idea of sexy was Two Moon Junction. The reader has a point. Although Junction's steamy love scenes far outweighed any real intelligence in its screenplay, writer-director Zalman King (who co-produced 9 1/2 Weeks) obviously knows how to photograph beautiful people having good, cheap sex. Junction is an overheated romance with the look and feel of the Fifties. Blonde Sherilyn Fenn plays a Southern doll, engaged to be married but ripe for plucking. She is plucked, and replucked, by a hunky carnival roustabout (Richard Tyson); one of their closest encounters is a public groping in a restaurant with dumb-struck break-fasters as witnesses. In private, she rekindles the flames of passion by watching a tape he made of their lovemaking. Sherilyn also sizzles through a suggestive scene with Kristy McNichol, in which the two swap camisoles just for fun.

Even more removed in time, place and tone is Alan Rudolph's The Moderns, a sophisticated, semisatirical look at American expatriates in Paris during the Roaring Twenties: loose women, men in drag, nudes out for a stroll at dawn. Linda Fiorentino enticingly plays a flapper who grants time-shares in her bathtub to John Lone and Keith Carradine, both of whom assume conjugal rights.

Not even a time warp of nearly 2000 years kept Martin Scorsese from getting into trouble over his film The Last Temptation of Christ. Outraged Bible thumpers demanded, sight unseen, not merely that it be censored but that its negatives be destroyed. What scandalized the clergymen, who had refused invitations to a special prerelease screening, was word of a dream scene in which Christ, nude on the cross, hallucinates about a fleshly relationship with Mary Magdalene—played by a tattooed Barbara Hershey. One minister who did attend the screening, the Reverend Robert W. Thompson of the First Baptist Church of Evanston, Illinois, came down firmly on Scorsese's side, calling the film "a feast for the heart and soul. I must say this is a film I think Jesus would have liked." Last Temptation should have shown up at a theater near you by now. Draw your own conclusions.

Other cinematic remembrances of things past have ranged from The Last Emperor, in which the couplings of Emperor Pu Yi (John Lone, again) with his wife and chief concubine are hidden beneath satin sheets, to Patty Hearst, in which Natasha Richardson, in the role of the kidnaped heiress, has sex with at least two of her captors but appears nude just once—in a bathing scene.

Male buns are visible, as usual, in all sorts of screen situations. Connoisseurs could argue the relative merits of the glutei maximi of, say, Rob Lowe as a conniving gigolo in Masquerade, Arnold Schwarzenegger prowling through a Soviet steam bath in search of drug dealers in Red Heat or Daniel Day-Lewis (again) baring spindly shanks while streaking through a short-lived comedy called Stars and Bars. So far, no sign of Richard Gere's rear this calendar year, but Monty Python veteran John Cleese rushed to fill the gap with backside and well-guarded frontal nudity in A Fish Called Wanda, in which he plays a staid London barrister who's caught in a sexual caper with Jamie Lee Curtis.

Sex proves deadly serious often enough, reinforcing a trend as old as the teen-slasher movies of years past and reemphasized by Fatal Attraction and No Way Out, a pair of 1987 holdovers portraying the wages of sin as potentially lethal that became best-selling videos in 1988. This year, after investigating zombies and making out with Cathy Tyson in The Serpent and the Rainbow, Bill Pullman is buried alive. In Sister Sister, a modern Gothic horror story, Jennifer Jason Leigh wakes up screaming from a blood-drenched sex dream as graphic as the one in last year's Angel Heart. Murder One, a drama based on the true details of a killing spree in Georgia, originally had a rape scene so horrific that most of it was scissored out—perhaps to return on video. Rape is also an issue in Heart of Midnight, another vehicle for Leigh, and is the subject of The Accused, starring Jodie Foster and Kelly McGillis in a story clearly inspired by the famous barroom-pool-table-assault trial in Massachusetts a few years ago. Here, the alleged attack takes place on a pinball machine.

But films about life on the dark side are seldom the ones to attract a huge following. By midsummer, everyone from Eddie Murphy to Kevin Costner appeared to be lightening up in a major way. Murphy's Coming to America, while spiced with mild nudity and a smattering of innuendo, is a surprisingly sweet romance. Eddie plays an African prince who chooses Queens, logically enough, as the best locale in which to find a royal mate. The harebrained hero of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a landmark hit mixing live actors with animated Toons, is also relatively innocent, a cartoon superstar of the Forties. Roger hires a human private eye (Bob Hoskins) to check on his faithless wife because she has been playing—now hear this—patty-cake with a prop-company mogul. The wife, Jessica Rabbit, is a Toon torch singer with extravagantly designed boobs. "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way," she explains in a husky voice supplied by Kathleen Turner.

Even more naïve than Roger is the 12-year-old played by Tom Hanks in Big. Wishing himself into adulthood, he winds up as a toy-company executive whose perks include Elizabeth Perkins. She "sleeps over" in his lower bunk (he wants to be on top) until he discovers that there are things boys and girls do together even better than jumping on a trampoline. Runner-up in the comic body-switching category, which saw four entries this year: Vice Versa, in which Judge Reinhold switches identities with his young son and has to fumble it when Dad's girlfriend (Corinne Bohrer) gets horny, unaware that she's dealing with a boy in a man's body.

In Big Top Pee-wee, Paul Reubens' alter ego, Pee-wee Herman—the nerd seemingly least likely to swing—jumps the bones of a pretty aerialist (Valeria Golino) and sets off some clashing sex symbols: a train penetrating a tunnel, fireworks erupting, waves crashing on the shore and female wrestlers writhing in mud. "Grownups will get the joke," Reubens told an interviewer.

Grownups can definitely understand the naughtiness afoot in Bull Durham, a baseball-cum-sex summer comedy that scored another grand slam. As a Southern belle who has vowed to take just one minor-league athlete into her bed each season—the candidate has to hit .250 or better—Susan Sarandon ends up pitching woo with both Tim Robbins, the rookie of the year, and Kevin Costner, a seasoned veteran. Her well-tested theory is that a guy who's good at balling will also be good at playing ball.

Among other releases well worth a giggle, Paul Mazursky's Moon over Parador casts Richard Dreyfuss as an actor impersonating a Latin-American dictator who has inconveniently died. Going to bed with Brazilian bombshell Sonia Braga turns out to be one of the irresistible fringe benefits of his new role.

Unabashedly kinky are the goings on in Track 29, starring Theresa Russell as a doctor's wife down in Dixie. While the doc (Christopher Lloyd) spends his (continued on page 179)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 142) passion on model trains or an occasional experiment in bondage with his head nurse (Sandra Bernhard), Theresa dreams up erotic fantasies about a young British layabout (Gary Oldman). His presence ultimately inspires her to sabotage hubby's goddamned trains, while derailing most of her own inhibitions. The characters get right down to basics in Patti Rocks, an outspoken sleeper—already available on video—about a philandering working-class husband (Chris Mulkey) who drags his best friend, Eddie (John Jenkins), along on a trip to another town to tell a pregnant chick, Patti (Karen Landry), why he can't marry her. Before these clowns' long night's journey into consciousness raising ends, Eddie is in bed with Patti, an extraordinarily liberated type who's obviously too good for either of them.

More kookie than kinky, Married to the Mob establishes Michelle Pfeiffer as a Mafia widow when her philandering husband, Frank "Cucumber" De Marco (Alec Baldwin), is found nude—and shot dead—in a hot tub with his chief's favorite hat-check girl. "They didn't call him Cucumber for nothin'," notes one dry-eyed mourner. Cocktail, based on Heywood Gould's novel, shakes up the ingredients of debauchery with Tom Cruise and Bryan Brown paired as a couple of randy mixologists on the bed-hopping New York bar scene. This time, though, the dirty words speak louder than the actions.

Films aimed at the youth market this year are mainly a sorry lot. A notch above the rest is Neil Simon's autobiographical Biloxi Blues, in which the calendar flips back to World War Two. Recruit Matthew Broderick goes through a basic training that includes a bumbling but funny sexual initiation with a helpful prostitute (Park Overall). Casual Sex? makes a feeble effort to meet contemporary issues head on, with Lea Thompson as a sleep-around girl spending her summer vacation aware of, but undaunted by, anxiety about safe sex. She has a horny, ho-hum time of it and winds up married to a jerk.

In For Keeps, Molly Ringwald begins to grow up in earnest as a pregnant teenaged bride. This turkey, really out of sync in its dippy romanticizing of the serious problems faced by immature parents, is memorable mainly for Ringwald's first screen encounter with a naked man (Randall Batinkoff) in the shower. She pronounces his penis "cute." He'd prefer "awesome." Well, her fans can hope for better things from Fresh Horses, in which Molly meets a college boy for what is promised to be "an obsessive and intoxicating" love.

Trash has always appealed to the teeny-bopper set, and this year's bumper crop of junk movies, while meeting the demand for mindless sex and violence, packs most of the titillation into its titles. Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Space Sluts in the Slammer and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, to name three, deliver their punch lines before the titles begin to roll. Most of them have scooted right past theaters to the shelves of your corner video store.

How are foreign films faring in this era of sexual nervousness? The British, who were leading the pack in permissiveness last year, stayed out front with White Mischief. Another fact-based blast from the past, this saga of British colonial misbehavior in Kenya during World War Two recounts each of the seven deadly sins. Mischief culminates in the murder of Charles Dance, a nonpareil seducer who has been getting it on with a wealthy old aristocrat's ripe-and-ready wife (Greta Scacchi, dressed to kill but frequently undressed for Dance). The film's most talked-about sequence, however, takes place in a morgue, where several of Dance's female conquests arrive to view the remains. The lady to watch is Sarah Miles as an eccentric voluptuary who lifts her skirt, masturbates, then touches moistened fingers to the dead man's lips and whispers, "Now you're mine forever."

There's plenty of body English as well as period color in Salome's Last Dance, by director Ken Russell, who has built his career on outrageousness. Here, he places Oscar Wilde (Nickolas Grace) in a brothel where his young lover (Douglas Hodge) is performing as John the Baptist in Wilde's own play Salome, banned as licentious in 1892. For Russell, it's relatively tame stuff, fleshed out by bare-breasted superwomen and a Salome (Imogen Millais-Scott) who has a sly way of getting head.

Forbidden fruit figures in Stealing Heaven, director Clive Donner's lush retelling of the 12th Century tragedy of Héloïse and Abélard. Cannes festival scouts report that the not-yet-released film contains steamy love scenes between Kim Thomson and Derek De Lint, playing the ill-fated pair whose unbridled passion led to castration and life in a monastery for him, a convent for her. England's James Wilby, who has the title role as a latent homosexual in Maurice, reappears as a cuckolded husband in A Handful of Dust. Oddly, Rupert Graves, who plays the actor who seduces Wilby's wife in this stylish adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel, also plays the gay gamekeeper who becomes Wilby's lover in Maurice. It's a small world over there.

Consuming Passions is an eccentric British comedy about cannibalism. Bonbons given extra flavor by the corpses of workers in a chocolate factory are the main joke. But the real surprise is a shameless stint by Vanessa Redgrave, who instantly seduces the young executive (Tyler Butter-worth) who has come to tell her she has been widowed because hubby fell into a vat. Vanessa, in a seeming feeding frenzy, all but eats the boy alive.

From elsewhere in the Commonwealth comes Shame, a blunt feminist tract about a woman lawyer (Deborra-Lee Furness) who, while hiking through Australia's outback, gets stuck in a sinister town where local studs casually gang-bang any sheila they take a fancy to—until the plucky heroine galvanizes local womenfolk to exact both justice and vengeance. High Tide stars Judy Davis, who may be Australia's answer to Meryl Streep, as a backup singer on the skids who's obliged to take a job in a strip joint. Davis does only minimal disrobing, though, and makes it look like a painful chore, as intended. You'll see more of Amanda Dole, a centerfold from Playboy's Australian edition, in Pandemonium, described by enthusiastic publicists as Australia's answer to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's bound to be more titillating than "Crocodile" Dundee II, a cheeky sequel that, while it offers substantial clues that Dundee (Paul Hogan) and his American friend (Linda Kozlowski) are living together in New York, dilutes their sexual chemistry with such prudence, you'd swear that the relationship was Platonic.

Elsewhere, Germany's Percy Adlon found a public hungry for his Bagdad Cafe, filmed in English and starring the ample Marianne Sagebrecht (she had the title role in Adlon's Sugarbaby) as an uninhibited German tourist who initiates cabaret entertainment at a truck stop in the Mojave desert. Yugoslavian-born director Dusan Makavejev's Manifesto lands an international but English-speaking cast in a mythical European village where some madcap revolutionaries, circa 1920, plan to assassinate the king. Advancing the plot, sort of, is an impetuous beauty (Danish actress Camilla Søeberg) whose lovers tend to die violent deaths after they've had their fill of her. Voraciously concupiscent and often nude, Søeberg at one point offers her body as a play area for a litter of exuberant, lucky pups.

The Spanish Matador is a dark fantasy about a retired bullfighter (Nacho Martinez) in whose tortured mind sex is so commingled with death that he's compelled to kill the woman to whom he's making love at her moment of climax. He finds a soulmate in a woman lawyer (Assumpta Serna) who performs similar tricks on her male lovers—the poor devils come and go at the same instant.

French imports in 1988 have been for the most part noncontroversial, with Bertrand Tavernier's Beatrice the striking exception. Set in the Middle Ages, this blasphemous tale of incest and other perversions stars 18-year-old Julie Delpy as the put-upon heroine who is defiled by her lecherous father. In contrast, The Grand Highway has all the robust humanity and joie de vivre of classic French comedy, describing the long, hot summer of a boy farmed out to family friends in a rustic village, where he learns almost more than he needs to by observing adults fighting, suffering and making love in a haystack.

Japan's A Taxing Woman zeroes in on a Tokyo businessman who clinches deals on the telephone while feeling up his secretary. German superstar Klaus Kinski, who can usually be counted on to come up with something unconventional, has two features on lap, both based on historical figures. In Werner Herzog's Cobra Verde, he plays an apparently conscience-stricken Brazilian slave trader who leads a rebellion. Kinski also directs and co-stars with his nubile steady companion, Deborah Caprioglio, in Paganini, a biography of the great violinist-composer that promises to be both melodic and erotic.

In the world of hard-core porno on film, most of the news is bad. A profusion of cheap, brightly packaged video quickies continues to glut the market, making quality, shot-on-film features economically unfeasible. Amanda by Night, a current hot seller in video, is OK for the indiscriminate. Candida Royalle's Sensual Escape, a twin set of stories directed by women (Royalle and porno superstar/magazine editor Gloria Leonard), is mild and pretty erotica on video, targeted for couples. In fact, Royalle has established such acceptability that she does TV talk shows, from Donahue to Dr. Ruth, and this year was invited to be guest speaker at a national convention of sex educators and therapists.

So porno lives, with or without condoms. But John "Johnny Wadd" Holmes died, reportedly of AIDS, this year, and gay film star Casey Donovan went the same way. Traci Lords, who nearly scuttled the industry when the story broke that she'd been the queen of X since she was 15, is now 21 and starring in Not of This Earth, the perfectly straight remake of a Roger Corman epic. Fully clothed, Traci plays a nurse who battles vampires from a distant planet. "If you're expecting an amusing B movie, you'll love it," says Traci, who is also quoted as vowing that she will no longer do nudes. Sic transit Traci.

The film industry, as always, tends to supply what it believes the public wants. Invariably, it's a crap shoot. The consumer demand for sexiness on the home screen may be met by the steamy but superficial excitement of such movies as Two Moon Junction. Mature treatments of human sexuality, as in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, remain relatively rare, but that may change. On the horizon are a number of movies with adult themes. Among them: Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy, based on his fiercely funny play about a proud drag queen and the boys in his life, with Matthew Broderick, of all people, playing Fierstein's lover; and two film versions of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the 18th Century French classic about corrupted innocence and competitive promiscuity, a stage version of which took London and New York by storm last year. So have patience, fans. When it comes to mankind's favorite contact sport, look for the best of it and keep in mind Noel Coward's observation that "sex is a question of lighting."