Sex in Cinema-2001

it was a year for naughty on-screen nooky--if you knew where to look

The phoniest moment in the movies this year came in the failed summer blockbuster Pearl Harbor, Perhaps you're thinking it occurred during the attack, when the fighter planes flew sideways between the buildings at the airfield. Sorry. How about after the attack, when the wheelchair-bound FDR infused his military chieftains with backbone by resolutely lifting himself, rather like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, onto his feet? Nice try. In fact, it came before the attack, when after a romantic night in bubbly Manhattan, the beautiful nurse played by Kate Beckinsale invites the square-jawed flyboy played by Ben Affleck to come up to her, room, where he will be invited to buzz her landing strip. Despite the fact that old Ben will be leaving the next morning for Britain, where he will help the doughier-faced flyboys in the RAF stave off the Nazi bullies in the Luftwaffe, he turns her down. He turns her down! Yes, a movie in which umpteen millions were spent getting the rivets on the Zeroes right somehow fumbled the prevailing sexual ethos of the era, which is that good girls don't, but when one does, a young man's proper response is: Straighten up and fly right. Bombs away, (text continued on page 90) Ben boy! Later, Ben sulks because Kate thinks he's dead and lets his best buddy taxi his Thunderbird into her hangar. Thankfully, the Japanese launched their sneak attack; otherwise Ben might have spent his entire tour of duty drinking mai tais and feeling sorry for himself.

The most honest moment? Perhaps it was in Scary Movie 2, when Marlon Wayans, playing the pothead Shorty, faces a she-demon with a monstrous face and a killer bod. Like a priest who moonlights for Roto-Rooter, Shorty puts a bag over her face and tries to exorcise her demon with his snake. Or maybe it was in The Animal, when Rob Schneider makes a pass at a goat. Or perhaps it was the humanity that oozed from every pixel in Final Fantasy.

Good choices all. However, the honor goes to Molly Parker's smart, subtle, unflinching performance in Wayne Wang's intelligent, erotic and sadly underseen The Center of the World. Parker plays Florence, an exotic dancer who agrees to spend a weekend in Las Vegas with Richard, a juvenile tech multimillionaire played well by Peter Sarsgaard. Their agreement is that they will limit their intimacy to the lapdance-length relationship they've established at the club where she works. At first they stick to the script, but other feelings and factors start to intrude. The movie is about the triangulation of sex, power and money; he advances the proposition that the computer is the center of the world and she contends that it is, in her words, the cunt. Even as she denies an emotional connection to the man who has just had sex with her, Parker offers us a brave and intelligent performance. The best characters in any movie are usually those who are self-aware; Parker lets us see Florence watching herself at a distance, calculating at every moment what to give and what to withhold.

The Center of the World may be the year's smartest movie about sex, but others took interesting passes at the subject. Also exploring the relationship between sex and love and money was Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge. Infusing the film with spirit and glow are its broad theatricality, the campy performances of modern-era pop songs transplanted to turn-of-the-century Paris and the unabashed performances of Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, neither of whom have reputations as singers. It isn't criticism to say there were better choices for the part of Satine than Kidman, who seemed too robust to be dying from consumption and who, though beautiful, doesn't project the right balance between challenge and invitation. But give Kidman credit: After Eyes Wide Shut and The Blue Room on Broadway, she is the best actress we have who isn't afraid to explore sexuality. It's probably just a matter of time before she's matched by Angelina Jolie, who this year appeared as the chaste, bodacious Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, with her breasts protruding like the propeller mounts on a P-51 Mustang, and who then heated up theaters opposite Antonio Banderas in Original Sin. Jolie brings a pouty, slouching, insolent sexiness to every part she takes. One longs to see her Lady Macbeth, her Cleopatra, her Mother Teresa. Other actresses who caused blood pressures to rise this year include Penélope Cruz in Blow, Renée Zellweger and Reese Weatherspoon (looking good in rabbit costumes in Bridget Jones' Diary and Legally Blonde, respectively), Jennifer Love Hewitt (showing impossible amounts of thigh in Heart-breakers), Estella Warren (the best-looking babe in Planet of the Apes) and Halle Berry (who, if she indeed received a $500,000 bonus for her brief topless appearance in Swordfish, obviously had a shrewd estimation of the worth of her breasts).

If Moulin Rouge is a sexy film that doesn't have much sex in it, Bully is a film full of sex that isn't sexy at all. This movie was directed by Larry Clark--who several years ago caused a sensation with his first film, Kids--and is based on a true story about a young man in Florida who is verbally, physically and psychologically abusive to the kids around him. Those children lack the strength and integrity to shun him, so they kill him instead. Bully is a distressing film; these kids have no ambition, no direction and no moral center. They move from amusement to amusement; Clark shows them having sex a lot, but the acts are performed without joy or tenderness or even much lust, pastimes about as involving as video games. The cast, which includes Rachel Miner, Brad Renfro, Nick Stahl and Bijou Phillips, deserves tremendous credit not merely for their performances but for their bravery. When we take off our clothes, we want to be liked; when these characters take off their clothes, we are sad and embarrassed for them.

Bully is one of several serious films this year in which the appearance of sex is a sign that things have gone very wrong (as opposed to the many comedies--One Night at McCool's, where Michael Douglas pithily observes how "all that good nooky turns into a big pile of agita," and even Down to Earth, where Chris Rock eyes a pretty girl and gets hit by a bus--in which sex wreaks havoc in the lives of men). In Dr. T and the Women, when Farrah Fawcett strips in a fountain, it's evidence of a crack-up. In Requiem for a Dream, Jennifer Connelly's addiction drives her to prostitution. Her humiliation in performing in a sex show with another girl before a roomful of business types who stuff money into the women's mouths is presented in a brilliant, excruciating montage that shows equivalent fates--imprisonment, amputation and shock therapy--suffered by three other characters who are addicts.

There is also a harrowing depiction of a rape in the French film Baise-Moi, directed by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi from Despentes' novel. Apart from that scene, however, the sex in Baise-Moi--which can be translated both as Fuck Me and Rape Me--is used to a different end. The movie is best described as a dark Thelma and Louise: A rape victim and a prostitute, each of whom has impulsively killed someone, go on the run together. Their escape becomes a series of robberies that end in murder and sexual encounters that (usually) end in the same manner. All the sex is explicit. The stars are two blue-movie actresses, Raffaëla Anderson and Karen Bach (as was co-director Trinh Thi), who here get to present more complete performances than they are usually called on to deliver (and, to be sure, more complete performances than Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts usually deliver). The film has an intriguing style. The violence and the sex and the women's thrill seeking and depraved indifference are supposed to shock, but it's all a little too stylized to provoke that reaction (unlike the understyled, documentary-like Bully, where the sex and violence is shocking). The movie suggests the energetic, fashionably noirish low-budget American International Pictures of the Sixties, when Peter Fonda or Dennis Hopper or Jack Nicholson or Warren Oates would go on the run, shooting people and muttering nihilistic aphorisms while affecting a rebellious style. Those movies would invariably treat audiences to brief glimpses of breasts and buttocks, and those flashes of flesh would seem barrier breaking and exciting. The sex in Baise-Moi is a distraction. The sex scenes constitute a movie within a movie, and the experience of seeing the film becomes how you feel about seeing explicit sex in a movie, and not about the movie itself. You don't need to see a penis go into a vagina to know that a prostitute is indifferent to the man fucking her, especially if most of the audience is focused on the penis and the vagina and barely registers the indifference.

(concluded on page 164) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 90)

Still, there are more examples of directors and actors choosing to include explicit sex. There was penetration in Idiots, by Danish director Lars von Trier; Vie de Jesus, by French director Bruno Dumont; and Romance, by French director Catherine Breillat. In Intimacy, the English-language film by French director Patrice Chereau that won the top award at this year's Berlin Film Festival, middle-aged people enjoy fellatio. The thriller Killing Me Softly seems to be the film currently pushing the boundary in Hollywood. Although director Chen Kaige says that Heather Graham and Joseph Fiennes did not have intercourse during their sex scenes, which reportedly involve bondage and sadomasochism, he tried not to give too much direction while filming those scenes "to see if the actors could create that chemistry themselves."

Amazingly, Baise-Moi was banned in France, where soft-core porn is on TV every night. Here in America, the fruits of a subtler form of censorship became evident this year. The hearings held in the fall of 2000 by Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain into the ratings system and Hollywood's depictions of sex and violence (as well as its marketing practices) did not result in legislation, but they caused a lot of self-regulation by the industry.

To inure themselves against future criticism, the studios resolved that they wouldn't market R-rated films to teenagers, advertise R-rated films on teenoriented television programs or in teen publications or advertise them on television before 10 at night.

Consequently, the studios began releasing fewer R-rated films, which they accomplished by cutting or restaging provocative scenes in order to get a PG-13 rating. In John Stockwell's Crazy/Beautiful, which began as a serious teen drama that would be released with an R rating, Kirsten Dunst plays a troubled teenager who eventually finds her way and is redeemed by the love of a good man. In one scene, in order to demonstrate her I-don't-give-a-shit attitude, she has to shock her boyfriend by walking through her father's house naked. That's how it was written, anyway. As we now see it, she's wearing panties and a belly shirt. The obvious damage is done to films with mature subject matter; the unanticipated damage is to the reliability of the ratings system. Films that contain strong material that really should get an R--The Fast and the Furious, for example--are being nipped and tucked for PG-13 ratings, then surprising parents of younger teens who think their kids are seeing something appropriate for their age.

This year wasn't all heavy lifting. After hearing characters in The Sidewalks of New York and Made make references to "rock star sex," it was nice to see that in Rock Star, Mark Wahlberg, playing a wannabe singer who suddenly achieves heavy-metal fame, fills his free time with groupies and orgies. In the end, happily, he discovers that the girl for him is the one who loved him prefame. Of course, it helps when that girl is Jennifer Aniston, who engages in interesting experimentation of her own as Mark gets his shot at stardom.

Bridget Jones' Diary was funny and sexy and had a generous way of griping about the foibles of both men and women. The film proved first that, in this day and age, a leading lady can weigh all the way up to 130 pounds and still look great, and second that a male character can be a rake and not be regarded as all bad. Daniel, the character played by Hugh Grant, is a hound and a heartbreaker, but his intelligence and charm and wit attract Bridget. Even when she's fallen for Mark (Colin Firth), who is stolid but admirable and, best of all, truly interested in her, she maintains a gleam in her eye for Daniel.

Now just for fun, contrast Bridget Jones' Diary, a feminine fantasy film in which men are given their due, with What Women Want, a feminine fantasy film in which men are rudely insulted. Mel Gibson plays a man who is able to win the love of a good woman only when he undergoes a kind of brain adaptation that enables him to understand these higher-order creatures. So drastic is his transformation that he even pretends to be gay (this is done briefly, and for a noble purpose: to let a nice girl down easy. But still . . .). This moment prefigured the French farce The Closet, in which a nondescript middle-aged male office worker claims to be gay in order to survive a round of layoffs. This immediately invests him with an aura that causes people to treat him more warmly and respectfully. So in these movies, at least, the hero is a denatured heterosexual, a step beyond last year's trend of the sexually disinterested hero (Gladiator, The Patriot, Cast Away and so on) and even this year's movie trend in which the guys are vague nerds and simpering weaklings (the boyfriends in Charlie's Angels, the boy band in Josie and the Pussycats, the sidekicks in Tomb Raider.) Thankfully, there have been some admirable heterosexual male role models recently--Jon Favreau in Made, Walhberg in Rock Star, McGregor in Moulin Rouge, Rock in Down to Earth, Jay Hernandez in Crazy/Beautiful, Nicolas Cage in Captain Corelli's Mandolin and, yeah, if you insist, Shrek. But when the male character in the past year who best embodies the liberating, joy-producing, life-enhancing spirit of sex is the Marquis de Sade--Geoffrey Rush in Quills--you know Hollywood still has to work out some issues.

Give Kidman credit: She is the best actress we have who isn't afraid to explore sexuality.