Look at the premise of No Hard Feelings and you would rightly expect to be scandalised. The film is a broad, affable comedy starring Jennifer Lawrence as a cash-strapped thirtysomething who is hired to “date” a 19-year-old introvert (Andrew Barth Feldman) at the behest of his wealthy helicopter parents. It’s a movie that sells itself on raunch: the button-pushing age-gap romance at its heart leads to plenty of sexually-tinged misadventure, including a much-discussed full-frontal fight scene involving Lawrence. But, as The Independent’s critic noted in our review, No Hard Feelings is ultimately a character piece dressed in sex-farce clothing. Its attitude towards sex all too often resembles that of a sniggering teenager. And it speaks to a problem that is rampant in Hollywood cinema today.
Where once the US film industry was confined by the puritanical restrictions of the Hays Code (the guidelines prohibiting swearing, sex and violence on screen, which lasted from 1934 to 1968), we are now in the thickets of a new censorious era. Sexless action films dominate the box office; long gone are the days when a work of unabashed erotica such as Basic Instinct could take the box office by storm. The bar for sex on screen has been lowered so far that films like No Hard Feelings can win plaudits simply by stumbling over it. The scope for properly explicit adult depictions of sex on screen has narrowed to a sliver.
