From 1970s classics such as The Wicker Man and Don’t Look Now to 1990s erotic thrillers Basic Instinct and Eyes Wide Shut, cinema history is rife with sexually explicit scenes and full-frontal nudity.
But with superhero movies dominating the box office in recent years, directors fearing accusations of coercion and younger audiences supposedly becoming more prudish, some have lamented the death of the sex scene.
The growing chatter is now over whether Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film, Poor Things – already a recipient of significant Oscar buzz – could mark a return to the licentiousness of old. It features more sex scenes, masturbation and full-frontal nudity than almost all modern studio-backed features.
“It’s weird, isn’t it? Why is there no sex in movies?” the director Lanthimos joked at a press conference in Venice film festival on Friday, hours before the picture was due to premiere.
Adapted from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, the comedy-horror – described as a feminist version of Frankenstein – follows Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by a brilliant and unorthodox scientist.
Childlike yet adult-bodied, Bella discovers the world, including her own sexuality, for the first time. The film, which co-stars Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe, was given an R-rating for sexual content, graphic nudity and disturbing material.
“It was a very intrinsic part of the novel itself, her freedom in everything, including sexuality,” Lanthimos said of the film’s sex scenes.
He added: “It was very important for me to not make a film that was going to be prude because that would be completely betraying the main character. We had to be confident Emma had to have no shame about her body, nudity, engaging in those scenes, and she understood that right away.”
Poor Things is not the only steamy number coming to screens this fall. Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, which premiered at Telluride, is a supernatural drama featuring an erotic romance between Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott.
And Ira Sachs’s acclaimed indie film Passages, which premiered at Sundance and stars Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adele Exarchopoulos in a menage a trois, was classified NC-17 by the US Motion Picture Association, which is its most restrictive rating. Even Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer featured naked romps between Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh.
The trend is a far cry from concerns expressed by young people on social media that sex scenes are objectifying and gratuitous. When Penn Badgley, star of hit Netflix drama You, said he would no longer film intimate scenes out of respect for his marriage, there were many fans who supported his decision, claiming sex scenes hardly ever advanced a film’s narrative.
Dr Jeff Scheible, senior lecturer in film studies at King’s College London, said it was possible to see the new slate of films “as a response to the sex that we are not seeing in all the sequels, remakes, Marvel movies, and so forth that Hollywood has been churning out the past several years”.
Culturally, he added, we are living through a complex and contradictory time. “Since the new millennium, with the internet, pornography and naked bodies are more visible, ubiquitous and readily available to see than ever before, so nudity and sex scenes might no longer be accompanied by the thrill that once accompanied them. At the same time, various studies have made it apparent that today’s generation of college students are having less actual sex than ever before,” he said.
Compounding this are the fears and hesitations around what is acceptable to depict in light of the #MeToo discourse. Bernardo Bertolucci prompted outrage after he admitted that the rape scene in Last Tango in Paris was shot without prior consent from a 19-year-old Maria Schneider. Sharon Stone said she never consented to the upskirt shot in Basic Instinct.
Could the widespread use of intimacy coordinators have created a significantly healthier atmosphere for actors? It would appear so, after Lanthimos on Friday paid tribute to Elle McAlpine, the intimacy coordinator on Poor Things.
“At the beginning, this profession felt a little threatening to most film-makers, but I think it’s like everything: if you’re with a good person, it’s great and you realise you actually need them. She made everything much easier for everyone,” he said.
