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 film-makers 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 Mescal, adapted by Andrew Haigh from Taichi Yamada’s novel. Directors would be wise to continue ignoring objections from the kinds of viewers who watch sex scenes and, instead of an embarrassment of riches, simply see embarrassment.
Further Reading
Sex and Storytelling in Modern Cinema by Lindsay Coleman (IB Tauris)
Don′t Look Now by Paul Newland (Intellect)
The History of Sex in American Film by Jody W Pennington (Praeger)
