Sex in Cinema 1996

For most of 1996, sex in mainstream movies appeared stuck in look-don'-touch mode: a strip-joint scene here, a flash of breast there. Then along came Crash, shaking up audiences at the Cannes Film Festival with its explicit, orgiastic parade of swingers whose carnal desires are ignited by automobile smashups and scar tissue. Although David Cronenberg's kinky auto-erotism shocked many festivalgoers, the film picked up a Special Jury Prize "for its daring, audacity and originality." It will arrive Stateside to create more controversy, inevitably carrying an NC-17 label from the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board. Crash takes a giant step beyond the minimal sexuality of Striptease, Demi Moore's coyly camera-shy and highly paid exercise in on-screen breast-baring. Similarly, much of the big-screen heat appeared to be generated by lap dancing or ultrasafe phone sex--the latter in Spike Lee's Girl 6 (Theresa Randle selling horniness on the horn), The Truth About Cats and Dogs (Janeane Garofalo making out on the wire through mutual masturbation with Ben Chaplin) and the Spanish-made Mouth to Mouth (an imported example of giving lip service to primal urges).

Going topless seemed to be the name of the game in quite a few movies, with a number of Showgirls types dancing in the background. Bordello of Blood features Angie Everhart and Playboy's (text concluded on page 156)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 129) own Miss July 1989, Erika Eleniak, along with the quota of vampires in the buff. Playmate Pamela Anderson Lee was burgeoning bustily, of course, in the title role of Barb Wire, a sort of female James Bond crossed with an avenging Barbie. Bonding is something else in Foxfire, in which high school girls on a rampage against sexual harassment decide to tattoo their breasts as a symbol of togetherness. In Two Deaths, Michael Gambon makes Sonia Braga expose her bosom in front of his dinner guests--just to show her off as his love slave.

There was palpable sex on the screen for viewers who knew where to look. Carried Away offers nubile Amy Locane as a precocious high school girl making out with her teacher (Dennis Hopper), even riding her horse Lady Godiva--style to tempt him. Hopper has nude scenes with Locane, then with Amy Irving, who plays his longtime colleague and bed partner. Hopper's balls-out performance continued a trend reported from Cannes, prompting Variety to describe 1996 as "a year when male nudity seemed to far outweigh female clothes-shedding." Time's Richard Corliss dubbed the spectacle "The Festival of Many Penises." Offered in evidence were such British-bred features as Peter Greenaway's imminent ode to body painting, The Pillow Book; Lars Von Trier's emotion-charged Breaking the Waves; and the controversial Trainspotting, director Danny Boyle's hot ticket about drugs, sex and dead-end kids in Scotland.

Captives offers Julia Ormond as a prison dentist who lets inmate Tim Roth do the drilling, while Australia's Angel Baby introduces Jacqueline McKenzie and John Lynch as a pair of avid lovers who meet in a mental hospital. In Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty, an idyll set in a hilltop Italian villa, gorgeous Liv Tyler (daughter of rocker Steven Tyler and Playboy's Miss November 1974, Bebe Buell) wows the assembled by shedding her blouse as well as her virginity. Caught, an intense love triangle with plenty of erotic action, catches Maria Conchita Alonso in the act any number of times as the bored wife of a New Jersey fishmonger (Edward James Olmos), whom she cheats on with a lusty young drifter (Arie Verveen).

There's more hilarity than body heat in the year's comedy entries, with Rodney Dangerfield soon to be seen ogling the strippers in Meet Wally Sparks. Josh Brolin does his bit to enliven Flirting With Disaster as a gay federal officer whose idea of a turn-on is licking Patricia Arquette's armpit. Setting a fast pace for senior citizens, Jack Lemmon goes starkers in Grumpier Old Men.

Gay began to look OK this year, even viably commercial if treated with cinematic pizzazz, or maybe appropriate tee-hee and sympathy. By the spring of 1996, The Birdcage had taken wing as a surprise hit, helped a lot by Nathan Lane and Robin Williams as the high-camp couple in a remake of La Cage aux Folles. Already in release was French Twist, starring Victoria Abril as a woman who gets even with her philandering husband (Alain Chabat) by insisting that her butch female admirer (director Josiane Balasko) join their family circle.

Lesbians proliferate at home and abroad in such films as England's Female Perversions (with Tilda Swinton as a woman who finds Karen Sillas preferable to the man in her life), Butterfly Kiss (starring Amanda Plummer and Saskia Reeves as a duo of psychotics roaming the highways and byways of Britain in search of male victims) and the hypnotic Bound (co-stars Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon make out while screwing the Mob's wiseguys out of millions). It's the boys (some dressed as girls) acting up in Stonewall, a lively fictionalization of the bad old days that begat Greenwich Village's annual Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade. There was more gay support in Germany's Maybe . . . Maybe Not, about a philandering heterosexual who finds solace with some chums away from home when his girlfriend kicks him out. Every approach to gay life on film, from the beginning of cinema to the present, is summed up for posterity in the documentary The Celluloid Closet.

Eroticism in costume epics was generally in short supply and seldom upbeat. Besides Moll Flanders--Robin Wright is the classic prostitute making her fortune, falling in love and posing nude-- the 1996 crop included Robert Downey Jr. in Restoration, joining the revels at the court of Charles II until the plague puts a damper on the ribaldry. In France's The Horseman on the Roof, Olivier Martinez gets lovely Juliette Binoche out of her clothes in an effort to bring down her fever after she is stricken with cholera. Soon to come is the American film version of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, in which sexy behavior is apt to get a person killed. Another kind of tragedy follows the coupling of Kate Winslet and Christopher Eccleston as an illicit twosome who desert their respective marriage partners in Jude, based on Thomas Hardy's classic novel Jude the Obscure. Also coming ere long to a theater near you is a brand new Romeo and Juliet, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as the star-crossed lovers--and we know what happens to them.

The next new wave in sexy cinema may be anybody's guess, but in addition to Crash, there is the promise of racier things to come: any day now, Abel Ferrara's The Funeral, offering a hot threesome among Amber Smith (our March 1995 cover girl), Vincent Gallo and Paul Hipp; a new version of Lolita, with Jeremy Irons as the rake enamored of a preternaturally sexy teen; a sequel to 91/2 Weeks, the sensation of 1986; a New Zealand entry called Broken English, said to be a sizzler; and David Lynch's imminent Lost Highway, which he describes as "a psychogenic fugue" that stars Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette and various partners in lust.

We can't wait.