Sex scene in movie

Film Taboo Is Smashed, to General Shrugging
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: April 27, 2005[/url] (registration required)

In his surreal novel "Flicker," the author Theodore Roszak evokes the breathless awe of a generation of naïve American moviegoers when European art films offered Americans who came of age in the 1950's their first glimpses of the erotic delights precluded by Hollywood's Production Code. Remembering his baptism in Eros with Louis Malle's "Lovers," the 1991 novel's besotted narrator marvels retrospectively at how "the camera doesn't stare salaciously" but instead examines a woman's body with "the true eye of an experienced lover."

In the nearly half century since then, a nagging question has persisted: When, if ever, will an erotic film not marketed as pornography show a man and a woman enjoying spontaneous, passionate full-frontal sex? With the appearance of Michael Winterbottom's "9 Songs," the answer is now.

This short feature-length movie, which the TriBeCa Film Festival is screening this evening and on Saturday, runs just under 70 minutes. Marketed at Cannes last year and previously shown at the Sundance and Toronto film festivals, "9 Songs" is to be commercially released by Tartan USA in late July. It has already opened in Britain.

As you watch the film's actors Kieran O'Brien and Margo Stilley make love several times, proceeding from straight sex into light kink (a blindfold and restraints), "9 Songs" offers a reasonably sexy chronicle of an affair, with psychological baggage attached to the lovemaking; these are real people, not pornographic party dolls.

But "9 Songs" carries a residue of sadness and disappointment. Part of the letdown comes from a sense that the long-awaited appearance of complete sex on the screen, filmed without coyness, is too little, too late. Popular culture has become so inundated with pornography and pseudo-pornography that everyday sex, when you finally see it on the screen, looks banal. What might once have seemed thrilling and liberating produces a ho-hum response: Is that all there is? "9 Songs" even elicits a quaint sense of embarrassment at having barged in and violated the privacy of its characters. What are we doing here, anyway?

The movie shows you everything: male and female genitalia in various states of arousal, penetration and orgasm achieved by good-looking actors playing characters with distinct personalities. Part of the letdown comes from the fact that the characters themselves take it so lightly; it's only sex. The word love is bandied about, then dropped. Weren't we brought up to believe the earth should move?

The affair of Matt, a British scientist who studies glaciers, and Lisa, an American visiting London, proceeds over several months and is remembered by Matt during an expedition to the South Pole. The lovers meet at a rock concert at Brixton Academy, in London. The movie alternates between the bedroom and the concert hall (with side trips to Antarctica), as sessions of lovemaking are interspersed with nine rock songs, performed by groups like the Dandy Warhols and the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. When the affair ends, Lisa returns to the United States.

Back in the days of "The Lovers," moviegoers would line up around the block at the local art house hoping to catch just a hint of what we see in "9 Songs." But that was then. The promise of erotic explicitness has long since stopped drawing overflow crowds to urban art houses. The scenes of oral sex and intercourse during menstruation in recent barrier-breaching films like Catherine Breillat's "Romance" and "Anatomy of Hell," and Vincent Gallo's "Brown Bunny" have not sparked box-office magic.

But why should they when the real-life sexual adventures of Paris Hilton, and of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, can be downloaded free from the Internet and replayed in the privacy of one's home? These pirated snippets may not be artistically photographed, but they're the real thing, and they're just the tip of a deepening pornographic iceberg.

If you Google the name Paris Hilton you'll find 2,240,000 English references, more than 2½ times the number, say, for Meryl Streep. The Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi, who has performed stud service in two of Ms. Breillat's films, yields 623,000, almost the same as Dustin Hoffman (633,000).

These statistics suggest that pornography and its cold, performance-driven vision of sex have overtaken and begun to obliterate the more personal view of sex presented by the typically adventurous European art films of the 1950's and 60's. For all their sexual indirection, those films portrayed sex as liberating but volatile and something to be handled with care.

In the pornographic view of sex, it as an extreme sport practiced by professionals who place a commercial value on their bodies and their activities. Of course, anybody with a home video camera can become a professional and play this exhibitionist game. And why not? Haven't we been harangued since the 1960's with the cliché everybody is a superstar?

A deepening revulsion toward that pornographic view is evident not only in the hysteria engendered by Janet Jackson's antics at the Super Bowl and other such incidents, but in a new breed of European art films that might be called anti-erotic sex films.

The Swedish filmmaker Lukas Moodysson's "Hole in My Heart," in which two men and a woman (naked much of the time) meet to make a pornographic movie but fail to connect sexually, is a revolting cry of disgust at the pornographic ethos. The worst of the horrors shown in Gaspar Noé's "Irreversible" is a graphic rape in which the camera refuses to turn away from the simulated but all-too-real-looking violence.

The simultaneous tumbling of the final sexual barriers in art films and the mass media's rising hysteria over indecency attest to the total disconnection between the two sides in America's culture wars. Until communication is restored, not likely in the near future, each side will try to pretend the other doesn't exist. For the conservative side, a marginally commercial art house film like "9 Songs" is easy to ignore; the chances of its being widely shown in the Bible Belt are minimal. Meanwhile, everywhere, the pornographic sea continues to rise.

Nicole Kidman and a young boy in the movie "Birth" seems like the wrong direction as they are in the tub together.

Re: Sex scene in movie


Generally speaking, hard core porn is real sex, soft core porn may or may not be real sex, and commercial, mainstream cinema is virtually never sex but (see the article above, and also the movie The Brown Bunny, where oral sex was performed), that may be changing. Halle Berry's big sex scene in Monster's Ball was simulated, for example.

Also, check ratings. PG-13 films cannot have real sex, they cannot show penetration and maintain that rating. R-rated films have more leeway but, in general, mainstream cinema does not show penetration and it does not happen because these are not desperate actors/actresses who will do anything for money. While a top may come off or private parts may be seen, the chances of real sex happening are nearly zero. After all, these are people who are usually not in relationships together, and they are real people with feelings, desires and morals. So doing it just to satisfy the camera is not good enough, particularly if they don't have to in order to make money and particularly if their union gets involved and nixes it.

X-rated films are different because they are made outside the mainstream. They have very little budget and the plot, such as it is, is generally just so much acrobatic bouncing around. The performers are not well-paid and some may be addicts desperate for cash. As for NC-17 films, which are more mainstream and tend to have bigger budgets and more established performers, real sex is theoretically possible but a lot more likely to not be happening (e. g. in the film Henry and June) because real sex between the performers is not something that the performers need to do in order to pay the rent and feed their families.

Re: Sex scene in movie


The technique is called acting.

Many actors have commented on their sex scenes at one point or another to talk about how they are concentrating more on putting an arm in the right position for the camera etc. There was a story a few years ago that sex scenes for "Wild Orchid" got a little out of hand and may have become realistic but Mickey Rourke was dating his costar. In most cases the actors involved only know each other professionally or may have met for the first time on the set. The scenes are usually well choreographed so the camera gets the needed shot to make you actually think they are having sex.

Keep in mind that while those scenes are being shot there could be as many as 30 people standing around behind the camera. Even on a cleared set there will be several people there; the director, the director of photography, the cameraman, at least 2 sound people, a makeup person, probably one grip and one gaffer. I think Angie Dickenson made a joke a few years ago about how "small" it makes men to be in that position with all those people around.

Is that so the sex scene in the movie is not real, I have this question in my mind since last few days I play an old computer game(Command and Comquer Red Alert2), the actress act as agent Tanya(Kari Wuhrer) is pretty, so I decided to search for her bio at web sites, but I saw alot of her movie screenshot which having sex scene, and this make me feel strange... And I have some in mind too, I think that actress no need to take of their clothe in movie in order to show us she is a pro in acting, maybe the storyline is needed, but I think naked in movie is not neccessary, mostly the sex scene whereby the actor and actress is having act on bed, I think this should be replace by showing the actor and actress going up to the bed(without seeing their private place or even not naked, can focus on the actress leg, then the clothes is fall down, then she goes up to the bed), then they two may have some kiss then a little hug then in the next morning, the actor or actress is lying on the bed, talking...then they wear their clothes on, that's it, a sex scene in a movie storyline can be replace by this.

most sex scenes don't add anything to the plot of a movie (except in a porno). The Matrix reloaded is a prime example. Neo and Trinity making love doesn't make any sense, it just tried to give the film a wider audience i.e. dirty old men!

Questionmark, that is theoretically a good idea, but unfortunately over used and corny, like in tv shows. You never see sex on TV, except on SBS Australia (and thats community TV anyway), and when they show the top coming off and then the next day with the curtains blowing softly in the wind. It was good, probably, when the idea first came out, but now its cliche and little more than a distraction to the real plot.

e.g. in The OC

Seth and Summer go at it, and you see nothing, and to be honest, if it weren;t tht Summer is a nympho, and Seth is socially inept, the wghole concept would be proposterous.

Yes, I agreed with makz 18 that sex scene in a movie does not make any to the plot of the movie, I ok with the scene, but not to see the naked body around, thats all. The idea seems to be used by many TV shows, but I thinks it still a good idea to be used to tell that the two characters is having sex before.