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.’”
