Sex in Cinema 2002

Let's start with the good news. The women this year had a blast, often with one another. In Frida, about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, Salma Hayek explored Ashley Judd's epidermal canvas. And in Kissing Jessica Stein, Jennifer Westfeldt played a comely Manhattan journalist who discovers, to her complete surprise, that her bad luck with men might be based on her attraction to women. Denise Richards and Aunjanue Ellis had the year's hottest, slyest, funniest girl-on-girl shower scene in Undercover Brother. And only producerly cowardice kept us from the spectacle of some of fiction's most iconic heroines in a Sapphic embrace. Reportedly the body-switching scene in Scooby-Doo, in which the identities of the Mystery Inc. investigators were zapped into one another's bodies, originally included a part in which Daphne was kissing Velma, which would have been hot! But the producers apparently didn't feel they could spend a week saying, "No! What? Who? What? No!" with sufficient conviction.

But this year in the movies, the bigger trend for women wasn't lesbianism but getting it on with younger men. In Unfaithful, the terrific Diane Lane had an affair with book dealer Olivier (text continued on page 84) Martinez. In Y Tu Mamá También, the beautiful, sad (and, as we are to discover, doomed) Maribel Verdú took up with two bright, confused, not yet formed young men on a road trip in Mexico. In Crush, Andie MacDowell, the buttoned-up headmistress of a British boarding school, became completely unbuttoned in the hands of a church organist she met at a funeral. In Lovely and Amazing, the unhappy Catherine Keener slept with the manager of the one-hour photo place where she works, mostly because he says she's really cute. (He was right.) He's played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who also plays the younger man who has an affair with Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl. Apparently he's the Older Woman's Younger Man of the Year. In Harvard Man, undergraduate Adrian Grenier slept with his philosophy professor Joey Lauren Adams. In Tadpole, teenager Aaron Stanford develops a crush on his stepmother, played by Sigourney Weaver, but ends up toddling into bed with her rambunctious best friend, Bebe Neuwirth. One of the problems facing the couple in the Israeli film Late Marriage is that his family disapproved of her for a host of reasons, her age being among them. In Van Wilder, a disgustingly decrepit old lady dean extorted some action out of the campus king, and even in Minority Report, Lois Smith, playing the scientist who invented pre-crime, enlivened an actionless scene full of expository dialogue by planting a big, hardly maternal wet one on Tom Cruise's lips.

The single most erotic moment of the year came in Roger Dodger, when the gorgeous, 30-something Jennifer Beals passionately kisses the 16-year-old Jesse Eisenberg. The kiss is the culmination of a long, sexually charged sequence in which the young man and his uncle, Roger, have been trying to pick up two women in a bar in hopes of bringing on the young man's sexual initiation. The sexual tension is palpable and, unlike so many movies, the audience has absolutely no idea whether or how the men will succeed. The kiss is a sublime moment in a pretty terrific film--arresting, provocative, memorable. (In fairness, the kiss in Spider-Man between the upside-down Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst in her rain-soaked blouse had a lot going for it, too.)

For some reason, the sexuality of older women is a subject that's in the air. This is also the year, you'll recall, when The Sexual Life of Catherine M., Catherine Millet's graphic memoir of 30 years of sexual adventure, enjoyed considerable attention. But there were examinations of female sexuality that didn't include older women. Me Without You is the story of the 25-year friendship of two girls, Marina and Holly, wonderfully played by Anna Friel and Michelle Williams. Marina is the sexy, adventurous one, while Holly is deeper and seemingly less attractive (not so, really). Interestingly, unlike so many chick flicks, the jealousy and competition that is a subtle, almost unspoken part of any friendship is this film's dramatic heart. In The Sweetest Thing, perhaps the most hideous movie of the year, Cameron Diaz is a player in San Francisco who comes face-to-face with the possibility that she has found her one true love. Diaz, who endeared herself to audiences for the sweet aplomb with which she pulled off the hair-gel scene in There's Something About Mary a few seasons back, must have thought she could pull off Farrelly brothers without the Farrellys. But as they themselves have so often shown, it's not easy to make this kind of movie. Among the plot digressions is a prolonged blow job joke that alone would warrant changing the movie's title to The Most Excruciating Thing.

Previously in the movies, expressions of female sexuality outside of marriage or relationships usually end up being punished. That's only sometimes the case this year. Certainly Diane Lane's affair destroyed her lover, her marriage and the entire architecture of her life. (It's interesting that in Fatal Attraction, the last time director Adrian Lyne examined this subject, the victimized spouse, played by Anne Archer, killed the temptress and saved her family; this time, the victimized spouse, played by Richard Gere, killed the man who cuckolded him, and ruined everything for everybody. So let's not hear any more about guys who get to defend their honor.) Similarly, in Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise's life and career were destroyed by his sexual involvement with the crazed Cameron Diaz. And yes, Shannyn Sossamon, determined to lose her virginity in The Rules of Attraction, was simultaneously raped, vomited on and videotaped, although in the stylized, cynical world of Bret Easton Ellis (from whose novel the film was adapted), such moments are not crises but typical of the collateral damage the culture wreaks on its young. (The Rules of Attraction is additionally smart, funny, brilliantly directed, sordid, scary and deliberately provocative.) But Andie MacDowell's affair was a surprising gift in what had become her predictable middle age (although her lover gets killed), Maribel Verdú's experience was a cry of self-affirmation (although she dies) and Catherine Keener's affair in Lovely and Amazing was a small, pleasant indulgence for a woman who hadn't been able to fulfill her early promise (although she gets arrested for statutory rape.) All right, how about this: In Secretary, Maggie Gyllenhaal (yes, sister of the aforementioned Jake) ends up in a comedic S&M relationship with James Spader that eventually blossoms into love. OK?

Of course, the movies wouldn't be the movies if sex and sexiness weren't somehow put on good display. Eliza Dushku and Zooey Deschanel in The New Guy looked wonderful and were so much better than their material; good things should happen to them. Kate Bosworth and Michelle Rodriguez both looked hot in Blue Crush, as did Beyoncé Knowles in Austin Powers in Goldmember. Birthday Girl was hardly the breathtaking creative adventure that last year's Moulin Rouge was, but Nicole Kid-man was even sexier and more provocative; her fellow Australian Naomi Watts did a brilliant turn in Mulholland Dr. Rachel Weisz seemed to be the embodiment of womanly sophistication in About a Boy, Charlotte Gainsbourg was elegant and chic in My Wife Is an Actress, Nia Vardalos was beautiful in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Brittany Murphy was winsome in 8 Mile and Jennifer Esposito did a perfect job adorning The Master of Disguise. Elizabeth Berkley, shot for Roger Dodger almost entirely in glittery, liquid close-ups, has never been sexier. I don't know who slipped what into Maura Tierney's granola, but the wholesome good-girl nurse on ER was a tiger in Scotland, PA.

The discovery of the year is in the film CQ, in which Angela Lindvall, playing an actress in a Barbarella-like movie called Dragonfly, combined Sharon Tate's beauty with Gwyneth Paltrow's inviting screen presence. Perhaps I'm a sucker for honey blondes with caterpillar eyelashes who writhe nearly naked on white shag carpeting. (The male discovery was the droll, funny Steve Coogan in 24 Hour Party People, a terrific movie that's more passionate about music than sex.) The bravest performance of the year belonged to the pretty Emily Mortimer in Lovely and Amazing. She portrayed a talented young actress who is obsessed with her looks and what she perceives as their short-comings. In one scene, she asks the man she's just had sex with to evaluate her body. And, surprisingly, he does. She gets out of bed and stands before him--and us--completely naked as he appraises her with clinical detachment. "Nice smile, but teeth too yellow. Nice boobs from the front, one is bigger than the other, a bit droopy from the side. In a perfect world your ass would (concluded on page 158) Sex in Cinema (continued from page 84) be rounder. Your bush needs a trim." And on and on. It's hard enough for an actress to take off her clothes and let everyone look at her; it must have been terrifying to have dialogue adjusted to describe even the smallest imperfection.

Sexwise, the most aptly titled movie of the year was Sex and Lucía, a movie that has so much sex it deserves title billing. Sex's co-star, Paz Vega, has been described prosaically as "the next Pénelope Cruz" and more poetically as "a gift to this life"; neither phrasing is an overstatement. There was also a lot of sex in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, including a particularly frisky sequence involving Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore. Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz struck a lot of sparks in Gangs of New York. The tide of this year's best pickup line was retired early in the season, when Russell Crowe, playing the brilliant but less than suave mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, approaches a beauteous blonde in a bar and after some moments of cogitation says, "I don't exactly know what I am required to say in order for you to have intercourse with me. Essentially, we're talking about fluid exchange, right, so could we go right to the sex?" (In case you haven't seen the movie, I won't tell you whether or not the approach succeeded.)

It's a shame that more movies haven't figured out how to treat male sexuality, because those that have are among the best pictures of the year. In Monster's Ball, Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry played characters mired in a culture of death and hate. They manage to break out of it by using sex, first for its explosive, disruptive power, and then for its ability to heal, soothe and sustain. The guys in The Rules of Attraction use sex because they can't find meaning in their lives, and sex, like drugs, is a pleasurable way of disguising that truth. In Roger Dodger, starring Campbell Scott, and About a Boy, starring Hugh Grant, the lead characters were smart and charming but were content to lead shallow, selfish existences until they were shocked to discover that there are larger dimensions to life. It's not that they discovered sex was no longer important. In fact, what they discovered is that sex had been filling a place where something equally profound belonged and that they were happier when things were more in balance. The cliché that men are interested only in sex isn't eradicated by movies that pretend men aren't interested in sex. Men are very interested in sex--hey, even that hot amnesiac secret agent remembered he liked girls--and it would be a treat if movies engaged that interest more often.