Sex in Cinema 1992

The notorious 40-odd seconds trimmed from Basic Instinct for audiences here in the U.S. somehow sum up the status of cinematic sex during 1992: a resurgence of hot stuff that wound up being cooled down. In a way, it was a banner year for sexuality on the screen, even though the banners sometimes seemed to be flying at half-mast. In a generally repressive social climate--partly traceable to the fear of AIDS and to feminist hysteria about sex as naked aggression--the message of moviedom soon took shape: If you can't do it, let your filmed fantasies dwell on it. Monogamy and commitment may well be the mood of the time. But try to peddle abstinence, fidelity or moral rectitude in a film and you'll be D.O.A. at the box office nine times out often. The pros remain aware that a film maker can harvest plenty of green from the field of dreams by following the tested formula: Stir their basic instincts and they will come.

(text continued on page 150)

Basic Instinct itself typified the industry's to-show-or-not-to-show schizophrenia. Its worldwide gross is estimated at well past $200,000,000, but international audiences saw more of director Paul Verhoeven's original film than did their counterparts in America. Edited from the U.S. version was a stabbing during coitus and some of Michael Douglas' carnal grappling with Jeanne Tripplehorn, but mostly the oral sex between Douglas and Sharon Stone. The latter bits--deemed prurient by arbiters at the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board--were glimpsed at the Cannes Film Festival by Roger Ebert, who reported saying to his companion that it didn't seem to have lasted 45 seconds. "It never does," she replied.

Carnality with a cartoon quality surfaces in Batman Returns, in which Michelle Pfeiffer's svelte, feline Catwoman expresses her desire for Batman (Michael Keaton) by fondly licking his face. Cool World is more explicitly cartoonlike, with Kim Basinger portraying a vixenish doodle drawn by Gabriel Byrne, who manages to cross over for some flesh-and-blood foolery.

In another fantasy, Lawnmower Man, Jeff Fahey and Jenny Wright join lip to hip for a cybernetic clinch straight out of the Stephen King spook factory. Francis Ford Coppola gives a daring twist to a classic in Bram Stoker's Dracula, his imminent retelling of that golden oldie, said to be highly eroticized--with lust, nudish brides and a beautiful victim (Sadie Frost) who is aroused to the point of climax by getting those little telltale puncture marks courtesy of Gary Oldman as the original bat man. (Doing double duty, Oldman also turns in a fur-raising performance as a werewolf.)

Sex takes a more realistic turn in a slew of mainstream releases. Director Roman Polanski co-stars his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, with Peter Coyote in the forthcoming Bitter Moon. They play a married couple testing the limits of erotica, reportedly on a scale to match that 1973 landmark Last Tango in Paris. Another European director presenting body English in English is France's Jean-Jacques Annaud, whose intensely passionate The Lover features Jane March, a British newcomer, opposite Tony Leung as the handsome Chinese merchant who joins her in a Saigon love nest for frequent experiments in pleasure during the Roaring Twenties (see review this issue for fuller details). Lover is based on an autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, the French author whose discreetly titillating total recall prompted the cautious MPAA to threaten an NC-17 rating--the dreaded substitute for the X introduced in 1990 but nonetheless treated by many newspapers (and some exhibitors) as a commercial kiss of death.

Violence is linked with sexuality on many a 1992 film trip. Basic Instinct's thrill killer is a case in point. Martin Scorsese's grueling remake of Cape Fear stars Robert De Niro as a vengeful convict vowing to rape and murder the wife and daughter (Jessica Lange and Juliette Lewis) of the lawyer (Nick Nolte) who mishandled his case. In Unlawful Entry, Ray Liotta plays a brutal, psychotic L.A. cop obsessed with forcing himself on Kurt Russell's wife (Madeleine Stowe). Evil deeds and sex also intermingle for Richard Gere, first in Final Analysis, in which he plays a shrink lured into violence by Kim Basinger, then in the upcoming Mr. Jones, in which Gere stars as a deranged, suicidal patient and Lena Olin as the psychiatrist treating him. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Patric, as drug-busting police agents in Rush, fall into bed and shoot up together. And a dangerous mix of vices comes to a head for Harvey Keitel in The Bad Lieutenant. Distributors plan to release this theatrically with the NC-17 rating. In this dark tale of redemption, Keitel sells drugs, uses drugs, strips for a scene with two callgirls, compels two young women to simulate oral sex while he masturbates and, finally, finds himself more intrigued than he should be by the rape of a pretty young nun.

•

Love is not a many-splendored thing in Poison Ivy, either. Drew Barrymore plays a schoolgirl who's bent on seducing a friend's daddy (Tom Skerritt) and on committing most of the seven deadly sins without blinking. In the Heat of Passion, which moved quickly from theaters to video, showcases Sally Kirkland as a ripe-and-ready wife getting it on with a handsome garage mechanic (Nick Corri) who, it turns out, is merely a cog in her scheme to make herself a widow. Nudity comes naturally in the lengthy At Play in the Fields of the Lord, a tale of modern American missionaries in the Amazon in which Tom Berenger gets stark naked by going native, then virtually wipes out an entire Indian tribe by picking up an influenza bug when he kisses Daryl Hannah as she's sunbathing au naturel.

Wild Orchid II: Two Shades of Blue comes from Zalman King, the man who produced 9 1/2 Weeks and directed Two Moon Junction, and features Nina Siemaszko as a teenager coming of age as a trainee in a brothel. She elects to go back to high school after a crude encounter with a horny U.S. Senator who wants her to perform with a couple of chums in front of his camcorder. That scene is most likely the one that moved King, in a TV appearance with Joan Rivers, to lash out at MPAA raters. "They are my enemy. I do not like them," said King. "Censorship in America by the MPAA is very strong and absolutely monitored. Audiences have never been permitted to see what my intentions were. I could submit Bambi and get an NC-17 or X." King ultimately turned to the tube, where his Red Shoe Diaries is a Showtime teleseries. The pilot film (David Duchovny, Brigitte Bako and Billy Wirth in a steamy triangle) is already a hot theatrical release in foreign markets.

Some films go straight to cable and video after a brief theatrical life. Among them is Small Kill, with Gary Burghoff as a mad killer in drag--a role so alien to his image as Radar in TV's M*A*S*H that it reportedly might cost him a lucrative contract as an ad spokesman for British Petroleum. Backtrack, in which Jodie Foster plays a witness to a Mob murder and gets emotionally involved with the hit man (Dennis Hopper) sent to ice her, went quickly to tape, despite Jodie's nude scene. Husbands and Lovers, far more sophisticated fare, features Joanna Pacula as an errant wife whose philandering husband (Julian Sands) is miffed because she wants to spend every weekend with her lover (Tcheky Karyo).

Moving in the reverse direction, from small to big screen, is David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, a feature-length prequel to his offbeat TV series. It covers the final days in the life of its murdered heroine (Sheryl Lee) and includes, of course, shades of incest and more debauchery than TV networks customarily tolerate.

Sex is just another power trip in The Player, Robert Altman's corrosive spoof of Hollywood. Tim Robbins becomes instantly involved with Greta Scacchi, the lover of a man he murders. Far and Away is markedly tame except for the usual bun shots of Tom Cruise and an amusing scene in which his co-star (and real-life wife) Nicole Kidman peeks at his privates concealed by a crockery bowl as he lies semiconscious, recovering from groin wounds she administered with a pitchfork. Boomerang's Robin Givens flashes flesh as a boss lady undressed for success with Eddie Murphy, almost out of character as a habitual womanizer who gets a taste of his own love-'em-and-leave-'em medicine.

Universal Soldier's main man, Jean-Claude Van Damme, is a robotically recycled Vietnam veteran who strips in front of Ally Walker because he's sure government bad guys have planted a beeper on his body. "Feel around for something hard," he tells her. Not surprisingly, she does--and has to explain that the phenomenon is normal.

Production values have returned to the adult-film world according to Paul Fishbein, publisher of Adult Video News. Features are again being shot on film, not videotape, to serve the cable and hotel pay-per-view markets. Fishbein singles out Chameleons: Not the Sequel, "one of only three adult movies in history to which we've given a five-A rating for sex, quality and good acting." Chameleons stars Ashlyn Gere vis-à-vis lusty partners who can change themselves into any form, or any gender, for sexual revels. "Another trend," adds Fishbein, "is anal video, especially the Caught from Behind series. Lots of the performers use condoms, but it's still taboo and viewers like to see it."

That's exactly the kind of outrageous film fare that inflames the Reverend Donald Wildmon, whose militant American Family Association backs his legal moves to ban an anticensorship documentary called Damned in the U.S.A. Although he was interviewed for the film "fairly and accurately" by his own admission, Wildmon objects to being on the same movie reel with Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, Andres Serrano's irreverent art and even an excerpt from a rude short film called Don't Be a Dick, by San Francisco moviemaker Deke Weaver. A film-festival favorite, Dick presents a flaccid penis, Weaver's own ("this was a very private affair"), painted with a face that bears a striking resemblance to that of Senator Jesse Helms.

•

This year the English, from Howards End to year's end, have offered nothing like Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books to tip the scales of juiciness. Nudity and incest are blatantly combined in Close My Eyes, an intelligent British entry starring Saskia Reeves as a bold young woman whose husband (Alan Rickman) doesn't seem too upset to learn that she has been sleeping with her brother (Clive Owen). England's Derek Jarman contributed Edward II, a modernized take on a Christopher Marlowe classic about the homosexual monarch (Steven Waddington), his lover Piers Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan) and a gay entourage. In addition to boy-boy love scenes, the movie boasts a homosexual dancing episode accompanied on screen by Annie Lennox singing Every Time We Say Goodbye. From Australia, Waiting is a pleasant comedy-drama about surrogate motherhood, with a hugely pregnant leading actress (Noni Hazlehurst) appearing unabashedly nude in several sequences.

The French, per long tradition, come through with their usual Gallic flair for passion in La Belle Noiseuse. Probably France's most explicit new export, the movie is a cerebral four-hour marathon affair between Michel Piccoli as a famous painter and Emmanuelle Béart as the model posing for a nude masterwork he's in no hurry to finish. Torn les Matins du Monde, much tamer, stars Gérard Depardieu as a renowned musician recalling the conquests of his student days (his own son, Guillaume, plays Depardieu the younger), when he coaxed his maestro's headstrong daughter (Anne Brochet) out of her vintage finery and left her pregnant. In For Sasha, gorgeous Sophie Marceau is a French wench in Israel who enjoys a swim in the buff with a trio of ardent admirers because, as she puts it in the subtitles, "a girl doesn't like to go skinny-dipping alone." France's drollest comic turn is The Hairdresser's Husband, starring Jean Rochefort as a man whose fixation on lady barbers begins in boyhood; even in adulthood, he is so titillated by every trim that his dear wife (Anna Galiena) ultimately ODs from shear delight.

Spain's Victoria Abril, a super sex symbol abroad, stars in Lovers as a conniving temptress who beds and beguiles a poor young ex-soldier, then persuades him to kill his innocent fiancée. Abril is even better in director Pedro Almodóvar's High Heels. This time she's a famous singer's daughter who marries her mom's former lover but mainly performs sexual acrobatics with an investigator (Miguel Bose) who's disguised as a night-club drag queen. Almodóvar's reputation for mind-bending screen scandal was reinforced by the long-delayed release of Pepi, Luci, Bom, with Carmen Maura. The highlight of this antisocial comedy is the scene in which a policeman's repressed wife urinates on the face of another young woman, who appears to savor the golden shower.

From Italy came the Oscar-winning Mediterraneo, awarded best foreign-language film for its rollicking portrait of Italian soldiers sent to a Greek island during World War Two. Their principal occupations turn out to be playing ball, drinking wine and making love to amenable local girls, especially the island's lovely resident prostitute (Vanna Barba). Also from Italy, Volere, Volare, with popular Maurizio Nichetti, is about a sound man who dubs cartoons whose fate is to become a tiny caricature of his former self, complete with genitalia and ready for love--which he gets in a sexy scene with Angela Funicchiaro.

Other notable imports include Zentropa, a multinational epic by a Danish director. It's the story of an idealistic American who seeks his German roots in the ruins of the Reich after World War Two. One of the movie's more memorable moments has Jean-Marc Barr and Barbara Sukowa wrecking a model-train layout in the heat of their passion. Raise the Red Lantern, China's contribution to the year's erotica, is a restrained, splendiferous epic about a young bride (Gong Li) who goes quietly berserk as the fourth wife of a wealthy Chinese polygamist; his custom is to have a red light swaying outside the home of the wife he has chosen to visit on a given night.

•

Movies seldom deal with human sexuality in a mature, responsible way. A viewer may hope for better things from some of the films slated to be unveiled--or undertaken--at presstime. Maybe Damage will deliver the goods, or at least amount to more than the stock blend of sex, suspense and cheap thrills. This drama, adapted from Josephine Hart's recent best seller, is directed by Louis Malle, with Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche reportedly creating spontaneous combustion as an unsuitable couple (she's his son's steady girlfriend). Also keep an eye out for The Bodyguard, which teams Kevin Costner with singing star Whitney Houston in the saga of a famous beauty's security guard who either takes his work home with him or works overtime at her place.

Director Alan J. Pakula's Consenting Adults brings on Kevin Kline and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, straining family values as a middle-class married couple who decide to swing in the fast lane and wind up having to deal with a murder. Likewise, in Body of Evidence, Madonna plays a woman accused of murdering her elderly ailing lover with drugs and sex, and she is said to be heating things up both on and off camera with co-star Willem Dafoe (who plays the defense attorney).

There's also a new Emmanuelle--seventh in the series--in the works, promising more of the same from a brand-new heroine (Marcela Walerstein). Sacred Sex, from Australian director Cynthia Connup, promises to show the ways of all flesh on an international scale, from a sort of orgiastic sex seminar in Hawaii to a one-woman show in Hamburg by Annie Sprinkle, exposing herself in what she calls a "public cervix announcement." Good or bad, Sacred Sex caused a commotion when it played to packed houses at the Berlin Film Festival, was banned elsewhere and may deliver some seismic shocks. One spokesperson for Miramax, its distributor, calls Sex "explicit and riveting, potentially the most controversial film of the year."

Meanwhile, author Joe Eszterhas (who wrote Basic Instinct and braved the ire of gay rights activists who called the film homophobic) has said he'll be working on a new thriller, Layers of Skin, which will take a more sympathetic view of the gay world. Oliver Stone, after JFK, is producing The Mayor of Castro Street, a gay-themed film about San Francisco's murdered Harvey Milk. Movies taking a strong stand on the AIDS crisis are projected by such illustrious Oscar-winning directors as Jonathan Demme, John Schlesinger and Francis Ford Coppola. If advance word means anything, there could be some provocative, daring and timely films in our future. We'll see.