Sex in Cinema 1993

The question was an intriguing one, and during the first few months of 1993, helped by a shrewd publicity campaign, it titillated movie fans around the world: What's the big surprise in The Crying Game? By early spring the answer had been leaked by TV film critic Gene Siskel, more than hinted at by Jaye Davidson's Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination and finally written large in the closing credits of the scattershot spoof Hot Shots! Part Deux, which recklessly reveals The Crying Game's secret: "She's a guy."

As the year progressed, it became clear that Crying Game wasn't the only film sending mixed signals about sex, and several major hits begged the question with considerably more tease than titillation. "Would you sleep with Robert Redford for a million dollars?" was the proposition that pulled well over $100 million into the coffers for Indecent Proposal, starring Redford, Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson. (text continued on page 144)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 132) Another film that prospered by mouthing off about sex but showing little of it was Made in America, which cast Whoopi Goldberg as a black woman who is told, after almost 20 years, that her daughter's dad--a sperm donor--is a white used-car huckster, played by Ted Danson. Except for one brief and awkward comic tussle, their on-screen affair is mostly mental. (Offscreen, apparently, it was something else again.) Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, teamed in the hit romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle, don't even meet--much less mate--until the final reel.

By late summer, family values seemed to have conquered Hollywood. Industry bean counters, having discovered that G and PG movies make money, placed their bets on child stars in such features as Once Upon a Forest, Dennis the Menace, Home Alone 2, Rookie of the Year and Jurassic Park (rated PG-13 and not for the very young, whose favorite dinosaur may still be Barney). Even Last Action Hero has Arnold Schwarzenegger swashing and buckling alongside 12-year-old Austin O'Brien. And as Mr. and Mrs. Blue in Undercover Blues, Dennis Quaid and Kathleen Turner fend off the bad guys with their toddler in tow.

When they do develop movies for mature audiences, industry bigwigs have evidently concluded that sex is most marketable when combined with violence. After last year's horny, homicidal and high-grossing Basic Instinct--which lingered on in a slew of parodies with similar titles--Sharon Stone returned in the tamer but much-talked-about Sliver. Its publicity was far more enticing than the film itself; as Newsday critic John Anderson observed, "Sliver produced a lot of heavy breathing before it even got on the screen. Now that it has, that sound you hear is Paramount Pictures hyperventilating." To avoid the hated NC-17 rating, still anathema to many advertisers and exhibitors, Sliver's producer and director agreed to cuts, though not the 110 requested by the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board. The movie emerged with minimal nudity, a rear-entry, up-against-the-wall love scene between Sharon Stone and William Baldwin and a pruned sequence of Stone masturbating in a bathtub. Despite its stress on lust, voyeurism and violent death in a high-rise apartment house, there's nothing in the toned-down Sliver that would have rocked cinematic standards two decades ago.

Madonna, who is anything but media-shy, had another of her widely publicized flops in Body of Evidence, also trimmed to suit the MPAA's ratings board. Playing a woman charged with bringing on her lover's demise via supercharged sex, Madonna ensnares her defense attorney (Willem Dafoe) with such devices as a quickie atop a car and ritualized lovemaking involving candle drippings and implied cunnilingus.

Director Louis Malle protested vociferously against the cuts that earned his Damage an R rating late last year (fans can presumably see the excised parts on the unrated video now in circulation). This coolly erotic psychodrama based on Josephine Hart's best-seller stars Jeremy Irons, who sheds his pants and his inhibitions as an eminent British doctor dallying disastrously with his son's intended bride (Juliette Binoche).

The most ambitious film to defy the MPAA ratings curse, taking an NC-17 rather than submit to censorship, is Wide Sargasso Sea. Newcomer Karina Lombard and British co-star Nathaniel Parker bare all in a pulse-pounding adaptation of Jean Rhys' novel, a kind of prequel to Bronte's Jane Eyre. Lombard plays the Jamaican heiress who marries the youthful Rochester but goes mad when his passion cools. Lombard's performance paved the way to a brief role in The Firm as the mysterious island beauty who seduces Tom Cruise on the beach.

Philip Kaufman, director of 1990's Henry & June--the movie that moved the MPAA to swap its X rating for NC-17--turned out a relatively steamy R-rated melodrama from Michael Crichton's best-seller Rising Sun. As L.A. detectives Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes investigate the death of a party girl (top model Tatjana Patitz) done away with during coitus in the boardroom of a Japanese-owned company, a videotape of the sultry victim's final minutes of rough sex with a mysterious assailant is played and replayed.

Young director Jennifer Lynch's Boxing Helena became a cause célèbre when Kim Basinger lost millions in a breach-of-contract suit for reneging on her agreement to take the controversial title role. Before Kim, Madonna had already declined. Sherilyn Fenn said yes to playing Helena, a glamourous girl-about-town who becomes a literal basket case when a young surgeon (Julian Sands), by love possessed, decides to amputate her arms and legs. Voyeurism turns these characters on: Sands spies through the window while a pre-surgical Fenn gets it on with a brutish bed partner (Bill Paxton), and later, she watches while her captor seduces Nicolette Scorsese to disprove Helena's aspersions about his sexual prowess. Dark humor and a streak of outrageousness seem second nature to Lynch, daughter of eccentric director David (Twin Peaks) Lynch. "Some people walk out of Boxing Helena, of course," admits Jennifer. "One man sat through it but came out looking very pale. When I asked why, he said: 'I feel really ashamed that I enjoyed it so much.' But the amazing thing is that about 65 percent of women react positively to the movie."

A more seasoned movie maverick, Robert Altman, has been focusing his camera on American foibles for more than a quarter of a century. He does it again in Short Cuts, a long, dark satire adapted from the stories of Raymond Carver. Hailed as one of the movie events of the year, Short Cuts is a series of interlocking tales in the mode of Altman's Nashville. Despite considerable nudity, male and female (see this issue's review), the film's most controversial sequence features Jennifer Jason Leigh as a young mother who gives explicit phone sex to clients while tending her children. "Don't you want me to lick your balls?" she purrs into the receiver during a diaper change.

In the imminent Carlito's Way, Al Pacino plays a paroled convict trying to go straight. Carlito takes over management of an after-hours club where sex on the premises is SOP, but he is shocked to find that his girlfriend (Penelope Ann Miller) has been stripping at a go-go joint. Carlito's promised high (or low) point is a decadent Long Island pool party, described by a publicist as "Seventies permissiveness regurgitated," where anything goes--from cocaine to blow jobs.

My choice for most erotic major movie of the year, however, is Australian director Jane Campion's The Piano, which shared first prize at the Cannes Festival in May with a Chinese entry, Farewell My Concubine (more of which later). Two American actors, Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel, share billing with New Zealand's Sam Neill (who also came up from down under to play top guy in Jurassic Park) in this cross-cultural milestone. Slow to build but spectacularly sexy, The Piano offers a tour de force by Hunter as Ada, a mute young woman sent to New Zealand in the mid-1800s to be Neill's bartered bride. Rather than haul it up from the beach, Neill trades Ada's prized possession, a crated piano, to Baines, a lusty neighbor (Keitel). Baines subsequently makes a deal with Ada: He will sell back the piano, one key at a time, in return for sexual favors. And they are off on an audaciously sensual orgy of illicit passion that is both startling and delicate. Keitel appears frontally nude, with the same air of abandon he showed last year in Bad Lieutenant, but this time he secures his status as a credible leading man.

Ada was but one of several female film characters whose bodies became a sort of carnal currency. Like Honeymoon in Vegas before it, Indecent Proposal treats women as bargaining chips (if not chippies) in a man's world. So, too, does Mad Dog and Glory, a comedy that has gangster Bill Murray sending Uma Thurman on loan for a week to shy police photographer Robert De Niro--out of gratitude for De Niro's saving his life.

The truly provocative theme of recent releases, as heralded by The Crying Game's love story between a transvestite (Davidson) and a terrorist (Stephen Rea), shaped up to be one of sexual ambiguity. Cross-dressing foolery in the Tootsie manner is coming to the screen soon in Mrs. Doubtfire, which has Robin Williams disguised as a British nanny so his ex-wife will hire him to look after their own kids. The same trend may be seen in Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, based on the Tom Robbins novel. Uma Thurman stars as a sultry hitchhiker on her way to a Dakota beauty ranch where the beldam in charge is played in drag by John Hurt. (As a sideline, Hurt's so-called Countess operates a company called Yoni-Yum, specializing in feminine-hygiene products.)

M. Butterfly is a far more serious example of sexual confusion, based on the Broadway-London stage hit retelling the true story of a diplomat (Jeremy Irons) who insists he never knew that his Chinese mistress (John Lone) was actually a man, and a spy. Echoing that bizarre tale is another saga inspired by fact, Maggie Greenwald's The Ballad of Little Jo, with Suzy Amis as a Western settler who staves off unwanted attentions by living out her entire life as a male (only the Asian ranch hand who shares her bed knows the truth).

Farewell My Concubine, the co-winner with The Piano of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, is an elegant historical epic about the lives of two famous actors in the Beijing Opera troupe--one of whom plays only female roles and obviously yearns to be more than a friend to his heterosexual co-star. Second to none of the above is the gender-bending classic Orlando, British director Sally Potter's vivid adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel about a character (Tilda Swinton) who lives for 400 years, changes sex in mid-life and enjoys a romance with a Russian princess (Charlotte Valandrey), then with a dashing American adventurer (Billy Zane).

Outing in films about gays is another matter, and the end of the line is not Philadelphia, which nonetheless marks a big breakthrough in Hollywood's approach to AIDS. A decade ago, top male stars might have considered such roles tantamount to career suicide, but in Philadelphia, Tom Hanks portrays a gay attorney who sues his law firm for dismissing him upon learning that he is HIV-positive. Antonio Banderas plays Hanks' lover, Denzel Washington his initially homophobic lawyer. Cliain of Desire, an updated American version of the Viennese classic La Ronde, includes in its depiction of a daisy chain of loving couples two homosexual interludes. In the first, Malcolm McDowell is a married man meeting a young hired stud; in the second, the boy finds a temporary haven with a sensitive male couple, one of the pair unblushingly nude.

Three of Hearts may well be the first major American romantic comedy to treat lesbians so blithely. Kelly Lynch and Sherilyn Fenn play a troubled twosome whose breakup becomes permanent when Lynch hires a gigolo (William Baldwin) to show her girlfriend that men are bad news. Of course, Fenn falls for Baldwin and vice versa, a solution that many gay people found ludicrous. Things work out more amicably all around in The Wedding Banquet, a knowingly liberated comedy about a Chinese-American New Yorker named Wai-Tung (Winston Chao), whose live-in lover (Mitchell Lichtenstein, son of artist Roy Lichtenstein) gets peevish when Wai-Tung's parents push him into a marriage of convenience. From Japan, Okoge combines eye-opening insights into the gay world of Tokyo with sympathetic views of another odd threesome: a shy young woman with no apparent sex life and the two male lovers--one married--to whom she offers her flat as a site for their rendezvous. They make use of it, zestfully. A true oddity in the genre is Dutch director Roeland Kerbosch's For a Lost Soldier, an unequivocal treatment of adolescent erotica, about a Canadian soldier's love affair with a 12-year-old boy following the World War Two liberation of Holland. Stateside such a movie--with at least one highly suggestive scene between man and boy--would be unlikely to get made, let alone be widely distributed.

Even so, the 30 feature films shown in New York's fifth annual Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and its ilk represented a surge of permissiveness that included Chain of Desire, Derek Jarman's biographical Wittgenstein, a graphic documentary called Nitrate Kisses (female senior citizens locked in carnal embraces) and Mark D'Auria's Smoke (about a washroom attendant with a yen for overweight older men). One of more than 60 gay film festivals regularly scheduled from San Francisco to Berlin to Hong Kong, New York's was notable for its inclusion of such unlikely items as Calamity Jane, the 1953 musical starring Doris Day. No, the movie doesn't claim that sharpshooter Jane was a closet lesbian, but the festival program notes state baldly: "When Day sings Secret Love, the gals know what secret she's talking about."

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The wall-to-wall-straight-sex film is virtually extinct except as a take-home video, and X--since the MPAA abandoned it in favor of NC-17--has become more a marketing tool than a legitimate rating. Probably the latest phenomenon to turn on the home audience is the so-called erotic thriller, which combines soft sex with beautiful women in tales of intrigue, danger and sundry dark deeds. This past spring, several top contenders of the genre were touted in a full-page feature in USA Today. Among the leaders are Double Threat, co-starring veteran Sally Kirkland and Andrew Stevens in a tale of treachery involving a faded film star, her leading man and the body double who does her nude scenes; Body of Influence (with Shannon Whirry as the voluptuous patient of a lusty shrink, played by John Cassavetes' son Nick--the title, of course, a direct steal from Madonna's Body of Evidence); and Sins of Desire (Nick Cassavetes again, teamed with onetime 007 leading lady Tanya Roberts as a couple brought into close contact while investigating a bogus sex-therapy clinic).

Actors Whirry and Joan Severance have capitalized on these erotic thrillers to soar to new levels of eminence. Following Illicit Behavior opposite Jack Scalia, Severance went on to star in Zalman King's Lake Consequence as a latter-day Lady Chatterley who runs off for erotic adventures with a tree trimmer (Billy Zane). Whirry had a major hit on the circuit with Animal Instincts (though the title has a Basic ring to it, the film--with Maxwell Caulfield and Olympic athlete Mitch Gaylord vis-à -vis Shannon--is actually a spin-off from the tale of Jeffrey and Kathy Willets, the Florida deputy sheriff and wife who turned prostitution into a cottage industry (The Creep, the Cop, His Wife & Her Lovers, Playboy, March 1992).

According to the publicist for a producer whose hottest titles have included Animal Instincts and Minor Images (with Mirror Images 2 on its way): "My guess is that all this started with Fatal Attraction, which made erotic thrillers more acceptable." The genre is less than acceptable, however, to veteran adult-film entrepreneurs such as Candida Royalle, whose Femme Productions turns out lighter, pro-feminist but explicit fare in the vein of her latest, Revelations. That's the soft-focus saga of a heroine (Amy Rapp) who is living in a futuristic America where intercourse is forbidden except for breeding purposes. She discovers some videotapes spelling out the raunchy good old days of recreational coitus. According to Royalle: "I'm definitely not making what they call erotic thrillers. I don't want to get into that. In America, it's a symptom of our total discomfort with sex that we can't stand the idea of erotica for itself. So we have to sublimate our desires by adding the threat of violence and danger."

When it comes to imported erotica, the clear leader of 1993's pack is Mexico's Like Water for Chocolate, the most widely seen foreign-language film in years. Alfonso Arau's titillating fable concerns Tita (Lumi Cavazos), who loses her beloved Pedro (Marco Leonardi, the young male star of Cinema Paradiso) because tradition requires him to marry her elder sister. Proving that cuisine is the way to a man's heart, Tita cooks up a rose-petal sauce with such aphrodisiac potency that the entire family gets horny--another sister, stripped naked, runs off with a rebel on horseback, and Tita herself ultimately beds Pedro in a close encounter by candlelight.

England, though, revealed relatively few naughty bits in 1993. Kenneth Branagh's version of Much Ado About Nothing did launch its Shakespearean high-jinks with all the lads shedding their tights for a bit of skinny-dipping. Eric Idle also drops trou briefly when he's forced to hide in a lady's closet in the farcical Splitting Heirs. A black comedy called The Hour of the Pig has some fun blending sex with religious rituals and body English in a French village. But English director Peter Greenaway's The Baby of Mâcon, not yet released in the U.S., was judged a disappointment at Cannes; the story of a miraculous child who becomes a kind of fertility symbol reportedly lacks the zing of Greenaway's earlier Drowning by Numbers or The Cook, the Thief His Wife & Her Lover.

From Spain comes Jamón Jamón (the word means ham, to which an orally fixated character compares the taste of women's breasts). Jamón contains frequent scenes of coupling in a meaty social satire. It's all started by a protective mama who hires the town hunk from a local ham warehouse to seduce gorgeous Silvia (Penelope Cruz), the girl her son got pregnant. The Swedish House of Angels, about a wild blonde chanteuse who inherits a farm in a quiet rural community, treats audiences to a nude swimming party she sets up to shock her stodgy neighbors.

In French films this year, sexuality seems largely cerebral, despite some glimpses of skin in Betty and incest in Olivier Olivier. Twisted love triangles are the concern of Un Coeur en Hiver (A Heart in Winter) and Oscar-winning Indo-chine, which stars Catherine Deneuve as a woman whose lover falls for her adopted daughter (no, Woody Allen was not the film's technical consultant). The real conversation piece in Paris has been Savage Nights, which received four César awards after Cyril Collard, the film's writer, director and star, died of AIDS, having appeared in his own autobiographical drama about a bisexual who has unsafe sex without telling either his male or female lovers.

What's on the books, both at home and abroad, is an open question. Britisher Mike Leigh's Naked, set for a 1994 release in the U.S., is said to be a sensation, highlighted by screen newcomer David Thewlis' white-hot performance as a lout scouring the mean streets of London. Madonna will surely have another go at heavy breathing as she pursues big-screen stardom in Snake Eyes. Regarding director Richard Rush's upcoming Color of Night, Variety columnist Army Archerd reports: "There'll be little left to wonder about" in love scenes between Bruce Willis and Jane March (of The Lover). Adds Rush: "It'll be a fight to get an R." Time will tell. Many a filmmaker's bold words have weakened when the MPAA starts threatening an NC-17.

Women in films are already having their say about what excites audiences, a clear trend headed by Jane Campion, whose startling The Piano leaves much of the competition playing Chopsticks. There may be the ripple of a womanly, warm-blooded new wave in Maggie Greenwald's The Ballad of Little Jo, Jennifer Lynch's Boxing Helena and Sally Potter's remarkably accomplished Orlando. Strong indications of more to follow come from producer Brandon Chase, whose Erotique is already under way for release in early 1994. In anthology form, four women directors (Lizzie Borden of the U.S., Hong Kong's Clara Law, Brazil's Ana Maria Magalhaes and Germany's Monika Treut) will offer what Chase calls "a woman's view of erotica in the Nineties," adding that "these are strong women, and they don't make wimpy statements."

Whether the images they put on the screen are more explicit or less so, the people who make movies are managing to address some unprecedented concerns about sexual roles, tackling subjects previously deemed all but untouchable. And Hollywood's product will never be limited to Betty Boop Meets Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Commenting on the industry's current infatuation with profitable flicks for kids, Universal's Tom Pollock observes: "As the baby boomlets grow into their teens, they will become more interested in Porky's." Or, one hopes, in The Piano. The allure of sex in cinema is part of an erotic evolution that sometimes stalls or skips a beat but can't be stopped, and filmmakers have not lost sight of that truth. So don't go away.

"'Don't you want me to lick your balls?' she purrs into the receiver during a diaper change."