Sex in Cinema 1991

As last year drew to a close, it seemed that things were looking up, Sex in Cinema-speaking. Making a major shift in the rating system it had often, and loudly, defended, the Motion Picture Association of America deep-sixed the abhorred X and introduced the NC-17 rating (no children under 17 admitted). At last, critics rejoiced, a distinction could be made between outright sleaze and tasteful erotica. Movies could now be made for and marketed to an adult audience; no (text continued on page 148) longer, the theory went, must they be pruned to the level of suitability for teeny-boppers.

Alas, the jubilation was premature. The Reverend Donald Wildmon, the crusading ayatollah of the arts whose American Family Association mans the barricades against prurience, and other self-anointed censors attacked the NC-17 with the same fervor they'd previously devoted to the X. Declaring "a cultural war," Wildmon promised, "It's just getting started."

For whatever reason--fear of Wildmon and Company or merely the simple fact that it takes time to get a picture into the pipeline--no major company has released an NC-17 film since Universal's 1990 Henry & June, the movie that started it all. As a result, all that 1991's cinematic fare may end up proving is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Although the M.P.A.A. has rerated a good many previously X'd attractions, some newspapers continue to ban advertising of NC-17 films, past or present. Also, Blockbuster Video, a nationwide chain, refuses to handle anything labeled porno or NC-17--quality be damned.

"That's where the next battle is going to be waged," declares Harvey Weinstein, a chief executive of Miramax Films, still smarting from his company's 1990 contretemps over the then-X-rated Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Says Weinstein, "We are studying the fundamentalists, the Wildmon group or whoever it is putting pressure on Blockbuster...and we're contemplating action against them."

The embattled National Endowment for the Arts found itself in the line of fire again this year over its funding of an unrated movie called Poison. Although director Todd Haynes's rather innocuous shocker won the top prize at Utah's 1991 Sundance Film Festival, some audience members walked out well before the end. In fact, Poison, based on three works by France's dean of depravity, the late Jean Genet, is both boring and audacious. Its most offending segment, called "Homo," is about men in a squalid French prison, either dreaming about or actually experiencing erections, urination and nonexplicit but unmistakable anal sex.

The fact that censorship prevails may come as a surprise to audiences flocking to see Madonna's Truth or Dare. The semistaged documentary shot during her Blond Ambition tour shows the rock superstar simulating masturbation, copulation and oral sex (with an Evian bottle). Throughout, Madonna is unfazed, even when local authorities in Canada threaten her with arrest.

Although indulgently rated R, Truth or Dare has had its own run-ins with the M.P.A.A., which also rates advertising campaigns--including movie trailers. Those for Truth or Dare and A Rage in Harlem, both distributed by Miramax, ran into trouble with the M.P.A.A., and Weinstein has harsh words for its czar, Jack Valenti. "He's killing us," says Weinstein, echoing another company spokesman's claim that the M.P.A.A. observes a double standard, dealing more harshly with independents than with more powerful Hollywood studios.

Only moderately sexy, A Rage in Harlem's trailer was originally red-banded (the equivalent of an R or an NC-17) because it included a scene in which a character wearing priestly clericals foils a mugger by pulling a pistol from a hollowed-out Bible. "Also, we showed Gregory Hines pointing a gun at Danny Glover, and the M.P.A.A. says a trailer can't show a weapon pointed at a victim. So now we have the gun pointed at Glover's dog.... I guess dogs are not considered victims." Truth or Dare's trailer, also red-banded, depicts Madonna plucking the petals from a daisy while musing, "He just wants to (bleep) me." The bleep, Miramax notes, is easily lip-readable. "After the battle of the bleep," says Weinstein, "they [the raters] also thought some of Madonna's Like a Virgin footage was too suggestive. Even though the movie itself is an R film, we finally came out with an unrated trailer--which many theaters across the country won't show."

High-tech adventure, spiritual quests, romance and fantasy seemed to characterize most movies in the American mainstream circa 1991. It was, after all, the year in which Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves won seven Oscars, while his Robin Hood became a box-office wow despite generally hostile press reaction (and a body double doing Kevin's sole nude scene). It was the year of Terminator 2, City Slickers, The Silence of the Lambs and Backdraft. Generally, though, the films most likely to jump-start the gonads tended to be minor hits--or total flops that found their real audiences only on video. Henry & June (body heat ad infinitum), White Palace (Susan Sarandon and James Spader steaming the screen as an older woman-younger man combo) and The Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Hanks as a married financier asking for trouble with Melanie Griffith in Brian De Palma's widely skewered version of the Tom Wolfe best seller) all seemed to attract viewers primed for take-home titillation. Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky, based on a Paul Bowles novel, was another instance of cerebral sex for private consumption--with Debra Winger and John Malkovich as a married couple sampling North Africa, drifting from his quickie with an Arab harlot to her stint as a desert nomad's sex toy.

The Grifters, directed by Stephen (Dangerous Liaisons) Frears, garnered Oscar nominations (but no statuettes) for Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening as ruthlessly bitchy rivals--respectively the mother and the mistress of a small-time con man (John Cusack)--mixed up in everything from petty larceny to incest and murder. Their mean streaks kept many a home fire sizzling.

Switch, director Blake Edwards' transsexual joke, also promises to score higher on the small screen than in theaters. Ellen Barkin plays the gender bender, returned to life as a woman after being murdered in his original incarnation as an indefatigable womanizer. Here's a guy who has to die to learn what he did for lust. Soapdish, a spoof of sudsy daytime TV, also looks likely to do better on video than it has been doing theatrically. As the upstart who yearns to replace veteran star Sally Field, Cathy Moriarty promises casting-couch favors to one harried executive (Robert Downey, Jr.). Get me the leading role, she vows, "and Mr. Fuzzy is yours." The Marrying Man, written by Neil Simon and touted as a main bout in the battle of the sexes, co-stars Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin as a horny, frequently wed couple. The movie generated far more heat in the press than on screen when the not-so-private pair publicly blamed everyone but themselves for Man's below-par performance.

More verbal than visual in its suggestiveness, Sibling Rivalry had a short career in theaters despite the popularity of star Kirstie Alley (of TV's Cheers) as a bored housewife with a lot of explaining to do when the stranger she picks up (Sam Elliott) drops dead of a heart attack, still wearing a condom after their fifth intimate encounter. He turns out to have been her long-absent brother-in-law, and his death takes most of the life--and nearly all of the sex--out of the movie.

Few major movies went overboard in prurience, opting instead for hints of hard-edged sexuality. The controversial Thelma & Louise, with Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis as gutsy runaways, sets its plot in motion with an attempted rape, but studio re-editing actually toned down a scene of joyous copulation between Davis and a no-good cowboy (Brad Pitt) who steals all the fugitives' money. Mortal Thoughts' Bruce Willis tries to rape his wife's best friend (played by his real wife, Demi Moore) in a sequence more violent than erotic. The Rapture (see (continued on page 166) Sex in Cinema(continued from page 148) review this issue) features Mimi Rogers as a part-time swinger who gets religion and trades recreational sex for fundamentalism--and eventual tragedy. As a writer hacking it in Forties Hollywood, Barton Fink's John Turturro makes love to a woman and wakes up to find her nude--and dead--body beside him in bed, a scene that is, thank God, understated.

The impact of films by young black directors is strong this year, reaching well beyond the black man--white woman love affair that makes Spike Lee's Jungle Fever a movie not just about interracial romance but about deeper social issues. In A Rage in Harlem, Gregory Hines spends lots of time in a brothel run by a drag queen; Forest Whitaker plays his Godfearing brother who falls for Robin Givens, a moll on the brink of salvation. New Jack City is another gritty showcase for Fever's male star Wesley Snipes, this time portraying a malicious top mobster who treats women as sex objects--and treats his business rivals even worse. Sex is considerably more than an aggressive macho aside in Matty Rich's Straight Out of Brooklyn. That movie's teenaged hero (Lawrence Gilliard, Jr.) escapes from a stifling home environment to bunk with his girlfriend--"doing the nasty," as his kid sister puts it, just to help him feel better. John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood, set in south central L.A., depicts a world where a black teenager (Morris Chestnut) hoping for a football scholarship already has a woman, a baby and little chance of breaking away from an ever-shrinking circle of sex, violence and the endless pocketa-pocketa of police helicopters whirling overhead.

Director Gus (Drugstore Cowboy), Van Sant puts a perverse spin on sexual desire in My Own Private Idaho. Van Sant has two hot young Hollywood hunks, Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix, playing male hustlers--turning tricks in Oregon and points east with middle-aged weirdos, mostly men, and kissing each other while camping out. The movie's most outrageous bits are carefully controlled, more stylized than graphic--with speeded-up motion, still shots and humor to soften the fact that what we're dealing with here are blow jobs. In the title role of Rambling Rose, Laura Dern plays a love-hungry housemaid who bares a breast while trying to seduce the head of a Southern household (Robert Duvall) way back when. She's the cain't-say-no gal fondly remembered in flashbacks; young Lukas Haas is the boy who thanks her for launching his sex education. Naked Obsession, released early this year, stars onetime golden boy William Katt as a crusading L.A. city councilman who strays with a local stripper (Maria Ford), then faces murder charges and--worse--his wife's infidelity. "Honey, I'm home!" he says, walking in on the missus and his best friend bouncing away on a table top. Even less inhibited but rather silly is Blue Movie Blue from Zalman King, the man behind such show-and-tell flicks as 9-1/2 Weeks and Wild Orchid. It's the story of a sweet young thing (Nina Siemaszko) who becomes top girl in an elegant bordello but finally runs away to go back to high school.

All but extinct in the obsolete realm of theatrical releases, adult movies are increasingly limited to video-taped product for sale or rental. In a slew of handsomely packaged but cheaply produced features too numerous to track are the usual ripoffs of better-known straight films. Such titles as Paul Norman's Cyrano ("His nose isn't just for sniffing anymore") and Edward Penis Hands need no further explanation. The year's most memorable hard-core adult movie, though, is probably Secrets, directed by Andrew Blake, who made Night Trips and Night Trips II. Blake's episodic, all but plotless Secrets has been a smash hit in France, and he is famous for MTV-style erotica--with good sound, scant dialog and beautiful people going at it in a big way.

For uncompromising sex on screen, the British are still coming up with the real thing, or at least the surreal thing. As before, England's main claim to preeminence in eroticism is staked by director Peter Greenaway. After the 1990 brouhaha over The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, it was only natural that Greenaway's 1987 Drowning by Numbers would come our way. The clothes of every male principal come off before he is put to death, in turn, by one of three closely related women--mother, daughter and niece--all named Cissie. The details don't matter. Like most Greenaway efforts, Drowning is patently devised to annoy as many viewers as it amuses. The M.P.A.A. was not amused by the movie's advertising, which dimly depicted a man and a woman in a compromising position. "The New York Times accepted our ad, but the M.P.A.A. kept giving us grief about it," says Miramax' director of advertising, David Dinerstein. "Drowning had already been rated R, but we just pulled the movie's rating and released it unrated."

Greenaway's next epic will be Prospero's Books, a fanciful version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, starring John Gielgud, Isabelle Pasco and evidently dozens of characters wearing nothing at all. No one knows, at this writing, whether the ample male and female frontal nudity will elicit an NC-17 and/or a thundering protest from the far right.

Meanwhile, other Brits keep lighting the torch for sexual freedom. Amanda Donohoe, recently visible as a lusty bisexual attorney on American TV's L.A. Law, stars with Gabriel Byrne in Dark Obsession. He is a jealous British aristocrat and hit-and-run driver who seems absorbed in rather explicit fantasies concerning Amanda's voracious appetite for love. Theresa Russell takes to the street, back seats, underpasses or anywhere she is hired to put out in director Ken Russell's Whore. She also talks directly to the camera in this blunt, grungy first-person account of a prostitute's true profession. It is not a pretty picture. The same might be said of Strip Jack Naked, an autobiographical film by Britain's Ron Peck, giving an account of his homosexual experiences since 1962, when he was 14. Shown at New York's third International Festival of Lesbian and Gay Films, Strip Jack Naked has nudity, movie clips, compassion and wry acknowledgments of the menace of AIDS.

Foreign-language films, with a few notable exceptions, are no longer setting the pace for adult movie fare, judged by what we've seen so far this year. The gorgeously photographed Ju Dou, an Oscar nominee from China, was disowned by its country of origin, which balked at being represented by a torrid tale of abuse, adultery and exhibitionism. The Soviet-French coproduction Taxi Blues is a caustic social satire full of hard-drinking Muscovites--fighting over their women in a sly slice of life that has one unsober citizen playing saxophone in the nude. The multilingual Europa, Europa is a serious epic about a Jewish boy passing for a Christian in wartime Russia, Poland and Germany, sleeping with a female Nazi and trying hard not to let anyone see that he has been circumcised.

From Tunisia, of all places, comes Halfouine. Director Ferid Boughedir's hero is a 12-year-old boy inching into puberty. Aroused by the constant spectacle of uninhibited naked women as he accompanies his mother to Turkish baths in the Halfounia section of Tunis, the boy finally achieves liberation. Boughedir deliberately sets out to break the taboos of an Arab culture "looking back at the Middle Ages."

Among upcoming films from France, one of the most eagerly anticipated is Madame Bovary, with Isabelle Huppert starred in the Flaubert classic about a restless middle-class matron who is driven to adultery, rebellion and suicide. There is more likely to be graphic sexuality, though, in Bertrand Blier's Merci la Vie. Blier tracks the peculiar career of a nymphet named Joelle (Anouk Grinberg) who sleeps with every man she meets and transmits an awful virus to each of her sex partners. The plot sickens when she falls in love with an unscrupulous doctor (the ubiquitous Gérard Depardieu) who encourages her promiscuity because it builds up his practice. In the age of AIDS, Merci sounds like a cold French kiss-off.

Small wonder that Naked Tango, The Comfort of Strangers and such super-sizzling features as Zandalee (which went straight to video, with Nicolas Cage and Erika Anderson still in a sweat) turn out to be sumptuously scenic but anti-erotic spectacles equating sex appeal with retribution and death.

Where do we go from here? Well, even Dinerstein, Miramax' adman, grants that he detects some improvement. "The ratings change was helpful. People are perceiving NC-17 films as more adult-oriented without the much heavier stigma that was attached to an X."

Despite a current tendency toward blandness, what the paying public wants will seldom be censored out of existence. The near future promises further intimate encounters between expectant parents Warren Beatty and Annette Bening in Bugsy, directed by Barry Levinson. This, lest we forget, is the story of Bugsy Siegel, the noted West Coast gang lord whose sexual prowess was legendary. It's believed to be white-hot. Ditto Wim Wenders' futuristic love story Until the End of the World, due late this year, co-starring William Hurt and French newcomer Solveig Dommartin in steaming proximity. No one is sure what to expect from such potentially potent book-based dramas as Claude Chabrol's Quiet Days in Clichy, based on another Henry Miller lulu about the author's early adventures in Paris and starring Andrew McCarthy, or David (Dead Ringers) Cronenberg's Naked Lunch--with Peter Weller, Judy Davis and Roy Scheider swelling the cast of a 1992 release adapted from the notorious blue book by William Burroughs.

A virtual cinch to stir the fires of controversy is Basic Instinct, an erotic thriller with Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, which will also open early next year. In San Francisco, where it was filmed, gay and lesbian picketers have already sworn to boycott the movie for what they see as explicit gay bashing.

The way things go is pretty accurately summed up by the ad campaign for the current Mobsters, a major movie with Christian Slater (as Lucky Luciano) and Richard Grieco (as a more youthful Bugsy Siegel) heading a foursome of young hoods on the make. "We're going to sell the picture for its heat and sexuality," admits producer Steve Roth, who adds as an afterthought, "We'd be stupid not to."

Roth clearly perceives the enduring truth that sex on the movie screen means business--and big business at that, especially when the moon is right and the public mood is mellow. It hasn't been a banner year for boldness. But while Wildmon and such vigilantes come and go, crying wolf over the clear and present danger of immorality, the movies over which they're losing sleep will probably outlast them.

Nc-17 Rating? What Nc-17 Rating?