The big idea: why we shouldn’t shy away from sex scenes

How was it for you? Ask some audience members that question in the afterglow of a movie sex scene, and there will be complaints that the earth didn’t move for them. The sceptics include directors – for every master of sensuality such as Claire Denis or Pedro Almodóvar, there is a famously reticent Spielberg, or a Tarantino, who admits that “sex is not part of my vision of cinema”. Gen Z viewers, too, recoil from carnality on screen, even questioning the legitimacy of sex as a storytelling tool. A glance at the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) uncovers objections to X-rated material: “A fade to black is all you really need,” remarks one naysayer among many. To which the only sane response must be: what on earth are these people watching?

A sex scene, like sex itself, is unlikely to be gratifying if it isn’t practised by people who know what they’re doing or are curious to learn. Perhaps its opponents have only ever experienced the wrong sort of screen sex – the cliched, the laughable, the gratuitous. Whereas the examples in Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle (1974), Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour (2014), Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997) or Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) – to choose four films that would be unthinkable without sex – are complex enough to render moot one X user’s argument that “no grown ass person in history [ever] watched a sex scene and said ‘yes that was a masterpiece.’”

Akerman’s film ends with the first explicit lesbian sex scene ever included in a mainstream feature; released in the same year as Barbara Hammer’s similarly groundbreaking short Dyketactics, it presents sex as an instrument of liberation and self-expression. The young protagonist Julie and her girlfriend are ravenous in bed, as befits a sequence that opens with the words “I’m hungry.” That spirit of abandon, though, is complicated by the scene’s structure and composition: it comprises only three shots, amounting to 10 minutes of screen time, filmed at arm’s length by a static, restrained camera. Even as the bodies tumble around together like clothes in a washing machine, our identification is kept intriguingly at bay.

Casting introduces another kink: Julie is played by the director herself, which transforms what might otherwise be exposure or vulnerability into an act of self-determination. The same is true of Akhavan, who as the star, director and co-writer of Appropriate Behaviour is uniquely placed to decide how her body is photographed.

One pivotal scene depicts a threesome in which the balance of power between a woman and the couple who have brought her home keeps shifting unpredictably. Anyone labouring under the misapprehension that a fade-out can express that level of nuance need only look at Call Me By Your Name (2017) to see how a movie is rendered unserious by timidity. That picture’s screenwriter, James Ivory, queried the director Luca Guadagnino’s decision to “pan the camera out of the window toward some trees” rather than showing his stars, Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, making the beast with two backs.

A recent UCLA survey found that gen Z viewers wanted “hopeful, uplifting content with people beating the odds”. Hearing that, it’s hard not to think of Chalamet again, this time giving a downhearted Saoirse Ronan a gentle reality check in Lady Bird (2017): “You’re going to have so much unspecial sex in your life,” he tells her. Film is adept at immortalising the sort of cringe-sex that outnumbers most people’s private porn-star triumphs. Think of Anna Paquin losing her virginity to a smirking, inexpert Kieran Culkin in Margaret (2011), or Gina McKee in Wonderland (1999) going home on the night bus after a demoralising quickie which ends with her surly date eating leftovers from a saucepan.

Screen sex can be uproarious, too, as it is during the symphony of creaking bed-springs in Delicatessen (1991), or when Emma Thompson and Jeff Goldblum practically destroy an entire flat during an afternoon session in The Tall Guy (1989). It can also lay the groundwork for the movie that

follows. Happy Together (1997) opens with a dogged, desperate 90-second sex scene between a couple whose imminent break-up will linger throughout the rest of the film; everything acquires an extra tinge of melancholy viewed through the prism of that once-ferocious passion. The protracted rutting at the start of Betty Blue (1986), an effective scene in a far-from-great movie, serves the opposite function: it raises the stakes, and the temperature.

The famous scene in Don’t Look Now, on the other hand, occurs once we are acquainted with the central couple, played by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, who are grieving over the death of their young daughter. There are so many electrifying elements here, such as the actors’ intimacy, the camera’s proximity to them, and the innovative editing, which flashes forward to shots of the pair getting dressed before returning us repeatedly to their churning bodies. Roeg even suggested that the lovers are trying in this moment for another child to assuage their loss, adding a glimmer of hope to the film’s stormy emotional brew.

The idea of removing sex from the cinematic vocabulary would plainly be as nonsensical as outlawing, say, dinner-table scenes or facial hair. Fortunately, there is no shortage of filmmakers working today who know how to use sex eloquently and without inhibition. Three of last year’s best movies – Ira Sachs’s Passages, Saim Sadiq’s Joyland and Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun – all deploy the carnal in arresting, adventurous ways. Two forthcoming literary adaptations are steeped in it: Yorgos Lanthimos’s film of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, starring Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo, and All of Us Strangers, with Andrew Scott and Paul

don’t know how funny I was as a kid,” he muses. “I was maybe a bit more in my feelings than funny. I think the humour came by surprise to me when I started making things. I loved videotaping things and editing them, making music videos and writing little sketches with my friends. And little by little, I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I should be in them.’ And then I started to kind of find this other side of myself, but I’m probably the least funny person in my family. My mom is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. She can joke between Arabic and English and French and cut up the whole room.” His parents were both born in Cairo but met in New York, where his grandfather was a UN interpreter for 30 years, before settling in New Jersey.

The adversity of his upbringing at least gave him a trove of material. In his first appearance on network TV, on Stephen Colbert’s show in 2017, he began by saying: “Hi, I’m Ramy Youssef. I’m Muslim … like, from the news,” before joking that when he turned 30 he expected to get “a Hogwarts letter from Isis”.

But one of the strengths of Ramy the show is how it avoids such easy laughs in favour of depth and authenticity. For non-Muslim viewers, it’s a window into a reality and a point of view that had never really been represented in mainstream media – the complexities of family, integration, prejudices, sex, sexuality, gender, guilt and shame. Some have accused the show of stereotyping, but Youssef says he never sought to speak for an entire culture or religion: “It’s almost impossible to do that. There’s too many things to represent. It’s too diverse. I probably could only say I’m representing the act of being really messy while seeking.”

For all its specificity, though, there is much that is universal about Ramy. “The amount of people I’ve had come up to me who go, ‘Dude, your family’s just like my family in Ohio, or in Jamaica,’ or, ‘Your uncle [Naseem, who is a rabid antisemite] is just like my uncle, except he’s Jewish and hates Muslims,’” says Youssef.

“That stuff is everywhere. America is so diverse in its thinking, its liberalism and conservatism, and it’s not really sectioned off to any area. Go 30 minutes out of any city, and you’re gonna find what you think is really far from you.” Still, he says, that doesn’t stop anyone from “sectioning off” groups of people on every scale, from supposedly crime-ridden neighbourhoods to Israel and Palestine.

Many of Youssef’s co-stars and crew have Palestinian roots, including Mohammed Amer (who was born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents), who plays one of his friends, and the Succession star Hiam Abbass, who plays his mother, who is French Palestinian. Or, indeed, Hadid, who has Palestinian Dutch heritage. “I think a lot of people feel incredibly unsafe,” he says. “A lot of people have lost family, between our cast members and American friends who have family in Gaza.”

Youssef made an episode of Ramy’s third season in Israel and Palestine in mid-2022, working with Palestinian actors and crew members. It was a politically tense time even then, he recalls. The Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh was shot and killed by Israeli forces while they were there – the entire production attended her funeral.

In the resultant episode, though, the geopolitics are just a backdrop to Ramy’s selfish mission to cross into East Jerusalem to hook up with a Tinder date, brandishing his American passport at border security to try to jump the queue. “The Palestinians are pissed at him, the Israelis are pissed at him, and the other thing I really wanted to highlight was just his privilege as an American,” says Youssef. “I wanted to put a spotlight on dynamics that … obviously they pain me and I see something skewed, but at the same time, how do I link that to my own complicity with it? Because I think that’s always the most interesting way to look at a problem: like, how do I shift this dynamic?”

This is what he’s always seeking to do, he says: “I always think about, how do we personalise these large, global things that feel like they’re out of our hands? What government dynamics exist in my friendships and in my family?”

On a personal level, at least, everything seems to be going in the right direction for Youssef. When he was 17, he was taping flyers to lamp-posts to get people to come to his gigs; now he’s the A-listers’ hot ticket. His cultural reach is still expanding. As well as acting, he is shooting a second standup special for HBO, which is due out next year. Mo, the sitcom he co-created with Amer, has been renewed for a second season. He is also excited about an animated series he is making for Amazon with the South Park writer Pam Brady. It is called #1 Happy Family USA, and again, it is a comic take on a Muslim American family desperately trying to fit in in the early 00s. “When we started making this show, I thought that I was examining the past; in the last couple of months, I’ve started to feel like I’m examining now.”

Reality comes crashing back into the conversation. After the horrific Hamas attacks last October, Islamophobia is almost worse than it was post-9/11, Youssef says. He finds it shocking “the way that people are so quick to dehumanise and vilify and think the worst of Arab men – what they think they can do to other people and what they think they do to Arab women. And the way that people can look at people who, especially in societies like London or America, are your neighbours, they’re your doctors, they’re serving you food, they’ve been next to you, side by side. But you’re ready to believe almost anything about them. I’m surprised and I’m not surprised.”

But he refuses to give in to despair. “I’m such an optimist,” he says. “I know that there has been this kind of reaction right now: everyone’s feeling really hurt, horrible things have happened to innocent people and it has created this shocked nervous-system response. I trust that we’re still going to be able to look each other in the eye and have real, grounded conversations that are not fully rooted in fear. And I think that’s where art comes in, because it helps cut through fear.”

• Poor Things is released in cinemasin the UK and IrelandfromFriday12 January

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