Sex in Cinema 1998

Anyone looking for an explosion of lust on Hollywood's big screen in 1998 has almost certainly been disappointed. Thrill seekers might do better seeing New York sloshed away by a tidal wave (as in Deep Impact) or stomped to death by Godzilla. Oh, there's still sex and mass destruction in cinema. It's just more romantic than racy these days, even in a family-oriented hit such as Titanic, which features Kate Winslet posing nude for movieland's man of the year, Leonardo DiCaprio. When they share carnal knowledge in the backseat of a vintage automobile below deck, the heat is expressed rather tamely by a hot hand thrust against the car's rear window. Posing in the buff also was the way to go in the glossy remake of Great Expectations, with Gwyneth (text continued on page 92) Paltrow stripped to be sketched and ogled by Ethan Hawke. Except for the 1997 holdover Boogie Nights--Paul Thomas Anderson's ode to the pornochic era of yesteryear--the late Nineties have looked restrained, with more voyeurism than flagrant exhibitionism.

In general, the subdued tone of recent mainstream releases is exemplified by Robert Redford's prudent screen version of The Horse Whisperer. While Nicholas Evans' novel was blatantly sexual, Redford omits any philandering between his character and that of co-star Kristin Scott Thomas, who play out their unconsummated love with hungry looks and sunlit Western scenery. Hollywood's cautious attitude toward dangerous subjects is evident in the fate of Adrian Lyne's remake of Lolita, finally out after a couple of years on the shelf. Major U.S. distributors were scared off by its encounters between a youngish dirty old man (Jeremy Irons) and a ripe-and-ready teenybopper (15-year-old Dominique Swain, rumored to have had a body double for the risqué scenes). When released in England, the film left most critics cold and untitillated.

Even so, the folks who make movies don't let you forget that, one way or another, "It's all about sex." So says Ben Stiller in Your Friends and Neighbors, a dark but not terribly explicit comedy about couples coupling, cooing and playing musical beds. It's from director Neil LaBute, whose previous work was the controversial In the Company of Men. As usual, there is plenty of conventional grappling by twosomes: Charlize Theron and Johnny Depp in The Astronaut's Wife; Patricia Arquette and Billy Crudup doing it in the grass under headlights in The Hi-Lo Country; Deborah Kara Unger vis-à-vis Mel Gibson in Payback; and Jennifer Lopez with George Clooney in Out of Sight. But let's face it, a flash of nudity or a quick shot of couples in bed or out in the barn is no longer news. There's at least a little fun mixed with the tomfoolery in The Mask of Zorro, when Antonio Banderas engages luscious leading lady Catherine Zeta-Jones in a fencing match and uses the tip of his foil to cut off her blouse. Sprightly satire also takes the sting out of sex in Baseketball, starring those South Park wags Trey Parker and Matt Stone in various stages of nudity accompanied by Bay-watch's Yasmine Bleeth, Jenny McCarthy and 1997 Playmate of the Year Victoria Silvstedt.

More action, still decidedly discreet, is provided by a threesome in Wild Things, with Matt Dillon as a horny high school guidance counselor abed with students Denise Richards and Neve Campbell. Yet the movie's most striking bit is a peekaboo shower shot of Kevin Bacon. The Blood Oranges features Sheryl Lee and Charles Dance as a pair going to hell with themselves in the tropics by seducing another married couple (Laila Robins, and Colin Lane as a one-armed photographer who likes to shoot natives in the buff). The Last Days of Disco depicts soft-edged decadence with just one caught-in-the-act moment between Jaid Barrymore and Chris Eigeman. Virtually the only 1998 film to alert our moral guardians was Two Girls and a Guy, which alarmed the MPAA's ratings board with a steamy episode of cunnilingus between a deceitful Robert Downey Jr. and Heather Graham.

Gay sex and straight-and-gay sex come across as timely subjects in The Opposite of Sex (Christina Ricci gets naked and seduces Martin Donovan's male lover). In The Velocity of Gary, Vincent D'Onofrio abandons sultry Salma Hayek (hard as it is to believe) for Thomas Jane, though Jane subsequently catches D'Onofrio flagrante delicto with Olivia d'Abo, playing a porn queen. Homosexuals come out in droves, too, in the holdover hit In and Out (Kevin Kline kissing Tom Selleck is probably the highlight). Iconoclast John Waters' latest is Pecker, though the suggestive title is simply the name given the hero (Edward Furlong), a Baltimore photographer who gains fame for his raunchy pictures of strippers, misfits and lesbians in a low joint called the Pelt Room. Love and Death on Long Island takes a sympathetic view of John Hurt as a British novelist obsessed with an American B-movie hunk played by Jason Priestley. I Think I Do depicts Alexis Arquette and Christian Maelen as closeted, slow-burning college roommates who don't acknowledge their latent lust until five years after graduation. Lesbians have their day again in High Art, with Ally Sheedy as a gay photographer who lures magazine editor Radha Mitchell into her stoned, sexed-up circle of friends.

Leave it to the English, though, to handle coming-out films with flourish. The new Velvet Goldmine is American director Todd Haynes' tribute to Seventies glam rock, starring Christian Bale as a journalist who masturbates to photos of a Bowie-like rock star, while Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Ewan McGregor portray flamboyant pop icons who dig each other offstage and on. Another erotic blast from Blighty is Wilde, starring Stephen Fry as the playwright imprisoned for frolicking with his titled young lover (Jude Law) and a few so-called rent boys. Love Is the Devil is a highly impressionistic, unflattering portrait of the artist Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi), who falls in love with his favorite male model (Daniel Craig), formerly an alcoholic burglar.

Heterosexuals have their day in The Wings of the Dove, with Helena Bonham-Carter's attention-getting nude scene opposite Linus Roache. In I Want You, Rachel Weisz catapults three men into a sexual frenzy in a seaside English town. Oscar nominee Minnie Driver (of Good Will Hunting) bares more than her soul in another lusty period piece, The Governess, portraying a young woman hired to be a child's tutor, but who winds up taking nude photos of her lord and master, Tom Wilkinson. That same Wilkinson is one of the working-class males who take it all off in The Full Monty, the stripteasing hit made in Britain. There's more male nudity and mooning in Waking Ned, a British comedy that made a splash at this year's Cannes Festival, about collecting a dead lottery winner's award.

Australia's raciest contribution to sexy cinema this year might be Welcome to Woop Woop, from the people who brought you The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. This one deals with the misadventures of an American con man (Johnathon Schaech) who is drugged, raped, kidnapped, shanghaied into marriage and lugged off to an outback shantytown by an over-sexed bimbette (Susie Porter). The waning wickedness in most mainstream American films can be explained in any number of ways. Four-letter words and taboo subjects no longer shake up people the way a movie's graphic images do. But times change, the pendulum swings, and bluestocking guardians of public morality have an impact on our nervous movie industry. Furthermore, ambivalent attitudes toward sex are as American as apple pie. Overprotective agents and high-powered publicists add to the chaos by insisting on no-nudity clauses in the contracts of major stars and even minor actors. Performers themselves tend to consider "serious" roles that aren't "sexy" (while Sharon Stone, for one, graduates from Basic Instinct to sterner stuff, let's remember that Marilyn Monroe, young Marlon Brando and many previous sex symbols made serious cinematic subjects irresistibly sexy).

It's not surprising, then, that the hottest waves of carnal knowledge originate on foreign shores. From Italy, Artemisia is a dark, sizzling biographical drama about Artemisia Gentileschi (Valentina Cervi), the pioneering Italian artist who liked to paint male nudes and invited trouble by claiming the kind of sexual freedom usually reserved for men. Still to come, among a host of erotic Italian epics that may or (concluded on page 148)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 92) a host of erotic Italian epics that may or may not be released here, is the controversial Toto Who Lived Twice, already banned in Rome as "an attack on sacred values" for a couple of shocking episodes: an angel having sex with a chicken, and another character's finding inspiration for masturbation in a statue of the Madonna. French filmmakers check in with Post Coitum, directed by and starring Brigitte Roüan as a fortyish matron so smitten by her young lover that she has graphic withdrawal symptoms when he leaves her. Steamier still is the French Dry Cleaning, about a married couple (Miou-Miou and Charles Berling) who operate a dry cleaning establishment and find their sexual fantasies more than fulfilled when they open their doors to a seductive young female impersonator. (For that unnerving performance, Stanislas Merhar won a César award as France's best young actor.) Vincent Perez stirred Cannes audiences with his pivotal role as a guy undergoing a sex change in Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, while the ever-popular Isabelle Huppert seeks and finds fulfillment in The School of Flesh.

Bestiality is implied though not explicit, and Ben Daniels is unabashedly nude in Passion in the Desert, adapted from Balzac's short story about a lost French soldier's bizarre, intimate relationship with a wild leopard. There is little doubt about what's going on in the French--Romanian Gadjo Dilo, the final round in director Tony Catlif's trilogy about Gypsy life. Here, a young Parisian (Romain Duris) treks to Romania to learn something about music and gets naked with a ravishing, uninhibited local dancer (Rona Hartner). In the Russian-language A Friend of the Deceased, the suicidal hero whose wife has left him hires an assassin to do the job but changes his mind after meeting a footloose prostitute. There's more Eastern European angst in The Thief, with two of Moscow's top-notch stars (Ekaterina Rednikova and Vladimir Mashkov) coming together in ways their Stateside counterparts probably never would. Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's main contribution to the sexual sweepstakes this year is Live Flesh. This sensual erotic thriller concerns a handsome lad named Victor (Liberto Rabal), who is sent to prison by two cops and gets even after his release by having affairs with the lawmen's wives (Angela Molina and Francesca Neri). From Denmark, Breaking the Waves director Lars von Trier comes back with The Idiots, about a free-spirited bunch of young people exploring the outer limits of craziness in an orgy, which obviously requires them to take off all their clothes. Not to be outdone, the Chinese East Palace, West Palace asserts that homosexuals, despite a government that frowns on such aberrations, are alive, well and still at it in modern China.

Viewers who are turned off by subtitles can turn to video for titillation. Filmmaker Andy Sidaris' Return to Savage Beach features the bosom-heaving adventures of Playboy Playmates Carrie Westcott and Shae Marks being pursued by muscular studs, and Playboy Films' own slate of hot-blooded new features includes Warm Texas Rain, with Steven Bauer, Frankie Thorne and Brenda Bakke. Current adult videos are still blatantly hard-core, ranging from Candida Royalle's woman-friendly Femme Productions releases (One Size Fits All is her latest) to such no-holes-barred sizzlers as the Adam & Eve Co.'s Other Woman and Heartfelt (not for the fainthearted or the Christian righteous).

The sexiest movie of the year is likely to be 54, a look back at the randy heyday of legendary nightspot Studio 54. Mike Myers, as co-owner Steve Rubell, is joined by Salma Hayek, Sela Ward and Neve Campbell to revive that Swinging Seventies era of drugs, disco and free love. Rumors abound that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, a suspense drama due in December, will offer an eye-opening love scene featuring married co-stars Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. For a heady mix of romance and sensuality, I'd bet on Shakespeare in Love, another year-end release. The grapevine tells me it's a hot, heavy and stylish period romance starring Joseph Fiennes (Ralph's brother) as the Bard, making extramarital whoopee with Gwyneth Paltrow as a girl pretending to be a boy actor. Will it be as good as anticipated, or merely a bit gamy? Aren't art and erotica compatible? The Old Masters thought so, long before movies existed.

The sexiest movie of the year is likely to be "54," a look back at the randy heyday of Studio 54.