Sex in Cinema 1997

We have seen many more explosions than orgasms on the screen in 1997. There have been exceptions, of course, to such volatile asexual blockbusters as Con Air and The Lost World. Uma Thurman oozed sex appeal as the man-killing Poison Ivy in Batman ? Robin, adding titillation to that well-traveled turf, and there's lots of suggestive ribaldry between Linda Fiorentino and Will Smith in the madly satirical Men in Black. More often, though, it has been the independently made features that have taken up the slack, sexually speaking.

Early in 1997 David Cronenberg's loudly touted Crash lost rpms after wowing voyeurs at last year's Cannes Film Festival, while The English Patient went on to win the Best Picture Oscar for its soaring romance and adult sexuality. Also commanding rapt attention on the American scene was The People vs. Larry Flynt, a maverick mainstream movie that infuriated Gloria Steinem and some militant feminists. It was followed much later by Boogie Nights, which explored the darker side of pornography, with actors Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore and Mark Wahlberg (text continued on page 168) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 130) baring their bodies or their souls or, in some cases, both. Strangely, the director, stars and powers-that-be behind Boogie Nights--even the oft-exposed ex-Calvin Klein underwear model Wahlberg--refused to release even mildly suggestive stills for publication. So much for making a statement about the freedom of expression.

Otherwise, we were treated to a mixed bag of eyepoppers: gay and lesbian flicks, forthright heterosexual coupling, openly kinky sex and more male nudity than usual in movies intended for general release. Being gay was shown in a positive light in the film version of Terrence McNally's Tony-winning play Love! Valour! Compassion! Homosexual and lesbian themes were also treated sympathetically in such films as Chasing Amy, Late Bloomers, Female Perversions, All Over Me, Childhood's End, My Best Friend's Wedding and Kiss Me, Guido. Quite an array of ideas about a lifestyle that used to inspire derision on film.

The quirkier stuff seemed to surface in so-called "straight" movies, from David Lynch's bizarre Lost Highway (and the aforementioned Crash) to the maligned Bliss (with Craig Sheffer, Sheryl Lee and Terence Stamp in a sort of cinematic sex manual) to the totally curious Kissed (horny girl works in a mortuary, where she mounts recently deceased young studs). Kinkiest of all is a documentary that drew audiences and won a special jury prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, even though many onlookers were horrified by the true-to-life shocks of Kirby Dick's Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. On a lighter note, Howard Stern's kinkily comic Private Parts may well have paved the way for further low jinks, such as the nude bowling scene in Dream With the Fishes or sexpot Kim Basinger's stint in L.A. Confidential as a Hollywood hooker surgically altered to look like Veronica Lake. And director Gregg Araki's No-where tracks Generation X excesses of all kinds through the streets of Venice, California. Dysfunctional families prevail in The Ice Storm (Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline and Joan Allen join mate swappers at a swinging Seventies "key party"). The Myth of Fingerprints (with Blythe Danner and Roy Scheider) has everyone home for Thanksgiving, humping away but not enjoying it much. Going All the Way, despite the promising title, features Jeremy Davies as a Korean War veteran who can't get it up with the girls who excite him most.

England's David Suchet and Lisa Harrow co-star in the American-made Sunday as a pair of middle-aged strangers coupling in Queens. More intercontinental casting occurs in director Abel Ferrara's romantic thriller The Blackout, which has Matthew Modine co-starring opposite German-born supermodel Claudia Schiffer and Beàtrice Dalle. Courtesan, lushly filmed in Italy with mostly Anglo actors, is another multinational epic. Catherine McCormack and Rufus Sewell shed their 16th century period costumes in Venice.

As always, the British came through with their fair share of offbeat eroticism. A gay dancer mates with his male shrink in Alive ? Kicking; a transsexual (formerly Carl, now known as Kim) played by Steven Mackintosh starts to date her former school chum (Rupert Graves) in Different for Girls; and Bent, based on the critically acclaimed play, deals with the romance between two gay men in a German concentration camp during the Holocaust. Both heterosexuality and homosexuality run rampant in filmmaker Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (starring Ewan McGregor and Vivian Wu), about the art of body painting. Sting is back to his old decadent tricks in the oddball Gentlemen Don't Eat Poets, and Julie Walters stars in Intimate Relations as a lust-driven English mom who enjoys threesomes abed with her pushy teenage daughter and a macho male lodger (Rupert Graves again). There's more body English, along with glimpses of English bodies, in Mike Leigh's Career Girls. Comedywise, The Full Monty dotes on five ordinary, unemployed Englishmen who decide to raise shillings by shedding their clothes in a male strip show patterned after the Chippendales'. Topping it all off is Kenneth Branagh's elaborate, star-studded Hamlet, in which Branagh, as what must be the first nude melancholy Dane to reach the big screen, teams himself with Kate Winslet's Ophelia. Breaking the Waves brought an Oscar nomination to Emily Watson, playing a sheltered Scottish lass who gets it on with strangers to supply her paralyzed husband with vicarious kicks. From New Zealand came Broken English, with breakthrough roles for newcomer Aleksandra Vujcic, as a passionate Croatian girl, and Julian Arahanga, as the Maori lover her family can't accept.

Among foreign-language imports, a few movies stirred controversy without raising temperatures. Banned in its native India, director Mira Nair's Kama Sutra had mainly its title to suggest the famous catalog of sexual positions. But the movie did offer an erotic, elegantly photographed display of hanky-panky among royals and commoners--unusually hot stuff for an Indian epic. Fire also marks a first for India with its frank treatment of a lesbian relationship between two unhappily married New Delhi women. Director Chen Kaige (of Farewell, My Concubine fame) raised more eyebrows in China than here with Temptress Moon, starring Gong Li. It's a vivid saga of a depraved dynastic family with voracious appetites for opium, sex and intrigue. Imminent from Hong Kong, following its New York Film Festival opening, is Happy Together, a homosexual love story set in Buenos Aires with two Chinese male stars, Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Leslie Cheung. The French gave us La Cérémonie, with Is-abelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire as a murderous quasi-lesbian pair of have-nots destined to dispatch Jacqueline Bisset's well-to-do family. The Oscar-winning Kolya was named Best Foreign Language Film of 1996 for its provocative view of a swinging middle-aged cellist whose sex life is inhibited, if not transformed, by a five-year-old boy wonder. From Iberia comes the long-delayed Spanish Mouth to Mouth, a comedy about phone sex that's amusing but hardly groundbreaking.

What next? Such forthcoming movies as Species 2, Virus, Titanic, Home Alone 3 and a remake of Great Expectations don't exactly raise hopes for getting audiences' gonads galloping. Neither, alas, does a so-so sequel called Another 9 1/2 Weeks (Mickey Rourke co-stars with Angie Everhart). Maybe someone will finally release the new version of Lolita, which doesn't involve crashed planes, trains, farm machines or luxury liners but does flirt with the more explosive issue of underage sex. Stay tuned.

In "Breaking the Waves" Emily Watson plays a Scottish lass who gets it on with strangers.