In Gaspard Noé’s film “Love”, the actors do not imitate sex, but actually do it. But you believe them less than frank scenes in those films where the actors only portray a love act. Why is the game more reliable? The Guardian columnist Tom Sutcliffe has his own version.
18+
When asked how he worked on the erotic scenes in the film “Love”, Gaspard Noe replied: “I did not interfere much.” It’s probably wise. On the set, it was clearly unnecessary to interfere. He already did everything to show his desire as voluminously as possible: he used 3D cameras, set up the actors to perform different versions of sexual acts almost for real. As Noe stated in his interviews, his idea was fundamentally anti-pornographic. Enough, they say, cinema to be so sanctimonious in depicting one of the main components of human life.
Noe is not alone in his ambition to expand the space of cinematic candor. A few years ago, British director Michael Winterbottom also complained about the restricted areas ahead of the release of his equally unambiguous film 9 Songs: “You can show people eating and doing other normal things, but you can’t show how two people make love, although it would seem that it could be more natural!”
Pass the tests
- How sexually liberated are you?
The premise of this kind of reasoning is that only cultural taboos prevent such scenes from being fully present on the screen. Although the empire of honesty in cinema is steadily expanding.
The implication is that less and less sophistication is required for liberation. But in fact, the question of directly showing sex, if you pretend to be artistic (as opposed to pornography, which any exhibitionist can shoot on a smartphone), is more of a philosophy than a culture.
The first is just like Catch 22. Sex, say supporters of a frank display of passion on the screen, is the peak of the emotional experiences of lovers. Hiding this moment under the mask of decency, we deprive the love story of a key component. But in fact, it is precisely because of the emotional potential that it is impossible to include such scenes in a work of art, so as not to cause feelings of embarrassment.
Read more:
- Porn: good or bad?
“Honestly, I don’t understand why there’s even a fuss about it,” the actor, who starred in Winterbottom in Nine Songs, said when asked about explicit scenes. It was tempting to answer this: “Maybe the point is that you can’t play it right ?!” Winterbottom may be right when he says, “What could be more natural than sex!” But in doing so, he strangely misses the fact that making love in public or watching others have sex is something few of us feel natural about.
The second problem stems from the first. You feel rather strange when you try to connect in your head the actions that are actually performed and acted out. When we see protagonist Murphy smashing a bottle of brandy on the head of his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend in Gaspar Noé’s film, we know that the jealousy attack is an act, and that no blood was actually shed and no one was hurt. But when we see how the partner brings him to orgasm, we understand that the actor really experienced him. In theory, the viewer in the course of action should ask himself: what is it like to experience what the hero experiences in the circumstances offered? But in this case, it is superseded by another question: what is it like to be an actor who has to do this in front of the camera? There is an imperceptible change. Fiction is giving way to documentaries about sex, and we find that reality is sometimes incompatible with realism.. (Pornography, raising the absolute reality of what is happening, is known to be hopelessly unrealistic.)
Read more:
- Boys risk becoming addicted to video games and pornography
5 Movies Where Explicit Scenes Have a Deep Meaning
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (directed by Philip Kaufman, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis, 1988): sex is more than sex, it is also a space of freedom in an unfree country.
“Pornographic connection” (Directed by Frederic Fontaine, starring Natalie Bay, Sergio Lopez, 1999): sex without commitment, from which love is born.
“Lust” (directed by Ang Lee, starring Tony Leung Chu Wai, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, 2007): sex as part of a spy game, complicated by a sudden outbreak of passion.
“Dangerous method” (directed by David Cronenberg, starring Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender, Vigo Mortenssen, 2011): sex as a fiasco of a psychoanalyst who could not resist being attracted to a patient.
“Young and beautiful” (directed by François Ozon, 2013, starring Marina Wacht, Charlotte Rampling): sex as a desperate attempt to overcome teenage neurosis.
See more at The Guardian.