A bold new world? Cinema’s renewed zeal for sexually explicit content
On the phone from Paris, Christophe Paou is recounting his favourite response to his latest film, Stranger by the Lake. “A friend of mine told me that her aunt went to see it with two friends,” says the actor, “and they were all 75. They really enjoyed it.” Given that Paou looks as if he could play James Bond’s French cousin, and given that he spends much of Stranger by the Lake stark naked, the grande dames’ enjoyment is understandable.
Alain Guiraudie’s unsettling romantic thriller is set entirely at a gay cruising spot, an idyllic retreat where men swim in the lake, sunbathe on the shore, and stroll into the woods for sex with strangers. “For me, the sex was like a stunt,’” recalls Paou of his no-holds-barred scenes. “Suddenly you have to take your motorbike and you have to jump over a 30-metre canyon. But it was okay. The sex was an important part of the story, so we had to cross the line. And, actually, the swimming was more difficult.”
The good news for Paou’s friend’s aunt is that Stranger by the Lake seems to be part of a new wave of sexually candid cinema. Lars von Trier’s two-volume erotic rumination, Nymphomaniac released on the day after Stranger by the Lake: both feature hardcore sex scenes, while employing body doubles from the porn industry to stand in (so to speak) for the close-ups. Last year, a number of other films made graphic bedroom action central to their scenarios, from Want Your Love, a tale of gay men in San Francisco which featured unsimulated sex between the stars themselves, to Blue is the Warmest Colour, the Palme d’Or winner whose extended sequences of lesbian love-making felt no less intimate for the use of fake genitalia. There was
Ialso a Chilean drama, Gloria, which left little to the imagination when its fiftysomething heroine picked up men at singles’ evenings, and Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love, which unflinchingly chronicled a middle-aged woman’s sex tourism in Kenya.
“Graphic sex is no longer off-limits in cinema culture,” says Droo Padhiar, head of publicity at Peccadillo Pictures, the distributors of I Want Your Love and Stranger by the Lake, “as long as it’s coupled with major festival wins, critical acclaim, and a wide marketing reach. There used to be a fear in the industry that no one would come out for these films. But when cinemas are willing to show films with a high sexual content, it gives audiences the green light.”
It’s been more than a decade since there were anywhere near as many movie cameras in the bedroom (or the woods). And back then, inevitably, Lars von Trier was also involved. After he included penetration shots in The Idiots in 1998, the French followed suit with Romance in 1999 and Baisemoi in 2000. In 2004, it was the Brits’ turn: Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs, which traced a couple’s relationship through their carnal interaction, was condemned/celebrated by the red-top press as the “Muckiest Film Ever”.
There used to be a fear in the industry that no one would come out for these films. But when cinemas are willing to show films with a high sexual content, it gives audiences the green light.
“Sex has been integral to cinema for a hundred years,” says the society’s president, Julian Marsh. “But there are dozens of horror-film festivals in the UK every year, and, as far as I know, there are no erotic film festivals. Most people only know the pornography they see on the internet. They don’t know that such a thing as quality adult films even exists.” James Franco recently directed Interior. Leather Bar., a film which envisages and discusses the 40 minutes of gay-orgy scenes which were cut from an Al Pacino/Wil- liam Friedkin cop thriller, Cruising, in 1980. “If we’re all adults,” Franco told one journalist in December, “and we all know we’re watching pornography — at least a huge portion of the population is — then why are we prohibiting it from our narrative films?” A month earlier, the American actress Evan Rachel Wood grumbled on Twitter that an oral-sex scene had been censored in her latest film, Charlie Countryman, “but the scenes of people being murdered by having their heads blown off remained intact and unaltered”. Meanwhile, her co-star in that film, Shia LaBeouf, also crops up in Nymphomaniac — and recently talked of sending Von Trier shots of his penis as part of the audition process.
At this rate, who knows what Paou’s friend’s aunt can look forward to? And if Spielberg revolutionised the military-combat sequence in Saving Private Ryan, what might be capable of if he made love, not war? THE INDEPENDENT