Gratuitous lesbian scenes were a problem long before Weinstein
Actresses becoming assertive over manipulation by directors
THE film director Mike Figgis once told me a good sex scene should make you squirm on the edge of your seat, because you can’t quite believe you’re watching something that intense and intimate in a movie theatre full of other people.
It’s a wonderful evocation of cinematic eroticism, but since Harvey Weinstein’s fall from grace the word squirm takes us somewhere else entirely. How does an audience now watch Frida, the Weinstein-produced biopic about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, when viewers are aware that the producer is said to have coerced its star, Selma Hayek, into performing a nude lesbian love scene — saying he would pull the movie if she refused?
Just to rack up the cringe of revulsion, Hayek’s co-star in the scene was Ashley Judd, one of the most prominent of Weinstein’s denouncers.
When you know that love scene was intended purely to sate the perversions of one crude bully, it loses all its luminosity. Who wants to be complicit in an act of abuse? Doesn’t that just put it on the same level as the worst pornography?
Just consider Hayek’s chilling account of the filming: “I arrived on the set the day we were to shoot the scene that I believed would save the movie. And for the first and last time in my career, I had a nervous breakdown: my body began to shake uncontrollably, my breath was short and I began to cry and cry, unable to stop, as if I were throwing up tears.” Weinstein denies the allegations.
The controversy will have made many a filmgoer review their complacent assumptions about arthouse cinema. There’s a widespread view that when you watch a sex scene in a film anointed as artistic, the encounter is integral to the film’s creative purpose. When we watch Belle de Jour, as opposed to Naughty Little Nymphos 2, we feel we have critic-sanctioned permission to view explicit fantasies.
Although perhaps a small guilty part of us wonders how many Sapphic sex scenes are integral to a film’s artistic aims: from Mulholland Drive to The Handmaiden, straight male directors seem awfully keen on filming two hot women getting it on.
Conversely, the most hotly anticipated erotic film of recent years, Fifty Shades of Grey, was directed by a woman (Sam Taylor Johnson) and was notable for the fact its male lead was not required to do any full-frontal nudity. Although Dakota Johnson was seen pubic hair and all, so what does that say about everyone: filmmakers and filmgoers?
In recent years we’ve been increasingly reminded auteurs can be as cynical as any pornographer. Even before the Weinstein scandal kicked off, actresses were becoming more assertive about detailing occasions when a director had manipulated them on screen, and off, in ways which made them feel profoundly uncomfortable.
One of the most shocking revelations concerned the famous anal sex scene in Last Tango in Paris. In a clip from a 2013 press tour, Bernardo Bertolucci admitted Marlon Brando and he had come up with the idea of using butter as a lubricant, but had not informed 19-year-old Maria Schneider until they came to shoot the scene.
The director justified himself by saying, “I wanted her reaction as a girl, not an actress. I wanted her to react humiliated”. Bertolucci succeeded in his aim and Schneider said: “I felt a little raped both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.” Equally chilling and reminiscent of Weinstein is the late actress’s description of Bertolucci’s general onset behaviour: “He was fat and sweaty and very manipulative… Some mornings on set he would be very nice and say hello and on other days, he wouldn’t say anything at all.”
More recently, Blue is the Warmest Colour, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, was mired in controversy after one of its leads, Lea Seydoux, said filming the seven-minute sex scene at the film’s core had left her feeling “like a prostitute”. Her co-star, 19-year-old Adele Exarchopoulos, agreed the experience had been “horrible” and both actresses said they’d never work with director Abdellatif Kechiche again.
It’s hard to think about the current controversies without dwelling on Alfred Hitchcock playing sadistic mind-games with an increasingly appalled Tippi Hedren in The Birds and Marnie. In Hedren’s recent autobiography, she revealed the director once threw himself on top of her in a limousine. The actress believes her rejection of Hitchcock’s advances led to an increasing level of abuse in his movies — something that will sound horribly familiar to Hayek.
In fact, you rather suspect many male film directors tell themselves whenever they edge an actress into doing something humiliating that they’re emulating Hitchcock and he was a genius.
Clearly the film world will have to clean itself up and I can suggest one small change that might help everyone involved.
As the end credits roll, how about a disclaimer that reads: “No actresses were harmed in the making of this movie...”?
‘We now know that auteurs can be as cynical as any pornographer’