Welcome or not, a breaking wave of screen sex is upon us. Television dramas are chock-full of intimate encounters and now cinemagoers have been warned to fasten their seatbelts, since many of the new films up for prizes in the next couple of months feature unusually graphic moments.
In fact, this could well be “the sexiest awards season in years”, or at least the one with the most sex scenes in it. So says the producer and film expert Jason Solomons, and for him it is a pleasing change of gear, coming after a mildly puritanical phase in entertainment.
“There was a kind of prudishness for a while, or a fear of upsetting people, that has gone away,” he said. “We do need sex in films, after all. If Greed was Good in the 80s of the film Wall Street, then Sex is Good now.”
Audiences have so far been offered lessons on How to Have Sex, courtesy of the British director Molly Manning Walker in a sensitive debut charting a young woman’s initiation, and they have learned about “May December” relationships in Todd Haynes’s film starring Julianne Moore as a woman who has had a relationship with an underage boy. Even Barbie and Ken have poked fun at sex, while Christopher Nolan’s camera lens has travelled under the bedcovers for the first time in the Bafta-nominated Oppenheimer.
And showing in cinemas now are Saltburn, a sinister sexual jaunt about class, the bold sci-fi romp Poor Things, in which Emma Stone plays a promiscuous woman with a baby’s brain, and All of Us Strangers, a film about sex and grief, in which actors Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal offer each other physical and emotional comfort.
Not to be outdone, Kristen Stewart promises her upcoming thriller, Love Lies Bleeding, contains a shocking sex scene in a bathroom between her and co-star Katy O’Brian. Probably more shocking, though, is Stewart’s admission that she enjoyed filming it. “It was really sexy. And I don’t mean from an outsider’s perspective. I felt turned on by it and it was cool to have people witness that,” she has confessed about the film, directed by Rose Glass and out in Britain in April.
Yet some things are still judged beyond the pale. Among various intimate scenes featured in the Golden Globe-winning Poor Things, one was cut down in the final edit. The Board of Film Classification balked at the length of a sequence in the Golden Globe-winning Poor Things which showed two boys watching sex in a Paris brothel. So, by dint of the Protection of Children Act 1978, the censors ruled that an 18 certificate would only be granted if these frames were edited. It turned out director Yorgas Lanthimos had already made these changes in the final edit.
“There has always been a lot of sex in films,” said veteran programmer Jane Giles, who selected adventurous titles for London’s legendary Scala cinema and has battled censorship in the past. “It has ebbed and flowed, but it sells, of course, and it is part of life and of drama. And I don’t think anybody would not see a film because a critic said it had too much sex in it.”
The current spate of screen sex is notable partly because it contrasts with all the sex-less, hi-tech violence of Hollywood’s endless superhero franchises. But just as remarkable is the way sex is being framed for a contemporary sensibility. It is now often there to shock, amuse or confuse, rather than to titillate or denote romantic love.
Directors, from Haynes to Saltburn’s Emerald Fennell, seem as interested in communicating distaste as in providing an erotic thrill. In May December when Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth makes her illicit moves on Charles Melton’s Joe there is little sense of joy, and the disrupting serial seductions of Barry Keoghan’s Oliver in Saltburn are more sabotage than spice.
Giles has watched the graphic depiction of sex move from the arthouse into the chain cinemas, but she celebrates the curiosity of those young teenagers who once used to sneak into the Scala to watch forbidden treasures. Many of them appear in her acclaimed documentary, Scala!!!, testifying to the way it broadened their outlook.
The censorship of screen sex loosened up in Britain in the early 2000s as the result of a series of public consultations. But rows did flare up, such as when Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs was released, with its “authentic” sex sequences. “Sex is different to other things an actor is asked to do,” said Giles, acknowledging the element of simulation that has always intrigued. “If they are asked to run, they just run. With sex, they pretend.”
So have we finally grown up about sex? Are film directors at last in sync with their audiences, content with both naked male and female bodies, and with the gay sex that crops up on popular shows such as White Lotus? After all, even the Pope has relaxed on the subject. Speaking in the Vatican last week he described sexual pleasure as “a gift from God”, although he is still not keen on “the demon of lust”.
A recent Ofcom survey revealed that British viewers are generally in favour of the changes in how sexual relationships are shown on television. They repeatedly noted that shows were “less likely to include gender stereotyping, objectification of women or uncritical depictions of exploitative relationships” and welcomed the way “intimate scenes are less likely to be portrayed from an exclusively male perspective by default.”
It is possible, of course, that these apparently heartening responses merely reflect the inuring effect of all the crass sexual imagery available on the internet, as well as the increasingly explicit content of video games.
In good drama the sex is there to tell the story, but it remains far from free of shame and politics. Even the liberated stars of All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh’s acclaimed British film, have admitted a degree of embarrassment about their intimate scenes.
Speaking to the BBC, Mescal indicated his concern about giving tickets to his relatives. “They have seen my bum before but there is a little more going on in this movie!’ he said, while his co-star Scott confessed: “I don’t want to be there when my parents watch it!”
Meanwhile, Jennifer Aniston recently incurred the wrath of younger women when she was dismissive about the modern requirement for an “intimacy coordinator” on set for sex scenes.
Lanthimos is on the record as happy to have had Elle McAlpine working in this professional role for the stronger sexual content of Poor Things. “She made everything much easier for everyone,” he recognised. And for many female viewers it seems to have worked. His film was nominated this month for a Girls on Film podcast award, which rewards “excellence in woman-focused films in the fields of diversity, inclusion and the representation of women and people of marginalised genders”.
Running neck and neck for nominations with Stone’s Bella Baxter for this particular awards event next month is Barbie, played by Margot Robbie. And the two characters make an interesting duo, with clear screen parallels. Both are childlike naifs, let loose in the cruel world, encountering philosophy and male oppression as they go. For some viewers this element makes the sex, or “furious jumping”, shown in Poor Things tricky to accept, despite the fact it is all based on an acclaimed Scottish literary classic by Alasdair Gray. “I felt queasy in those scenes,” said Solomons. “I understand Bella is meant to be a proto-feminist, but she is basically a child having sex in the early scenes and, although I was not offended, I felt these were choppy waters for Lanthimos.”
The sexual agency of Stone’s infantile character was also questioned on BBC Radio 4, with particular reference to the brothel scenes. The actor, also a co-producer, defended the portrayal of Bella, telling Front Row’s Samira Ahmed she is supposed to be “completely free and without shame about her body”.
Whatever the sexual and social politics, the entertainment industry is clearly moving away from deploying sex scenes as an obligatory component, like a car chase. No longer do these bits of choreographed action simply go through the motions, with audiences as relieved as the characters once it is over. The sex-by-numbers era was depressing and did not mark much creative progress from the repressive Hays Code days of Hollywood, when even married characters were required to keep one foot on the floor in the bedroom. Back then somehow, perhaps because of the restrictions, sex was fun; nice as well as naughty. In the 1934 romantic comedy It Happened One Night a spoiled heiress, played by Claudette Colbert, is forced to spend the night in a hotel room with Clark Gable, a man she has met on a bus, separated only by a sheet hung as a screen between them. The sexual tension has crackled down the decades.
By the 1970s the bedlinen was permanently raised and nude sex was de rigueur. Not all of it was nice though. Giles still cannot watch the brutal killing of the sexually adventurous woman in 1977’s Looking for Mr Goodbar, and points out the “feelbad” sexual dynamic of popular box office hits, including Saturday Night Fever.
The 1980s saw increasing fears about the impact of “video nasties” and the pornography suddenly available in the home; something that peculiarly happened in tandem with the overt linking of erotic sex and murderous violence in mainstream cinema hits such as Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct.
While the latest brand of film sex is sometimes weaponised, there seems a wiser acceptance of its moral ambiguities and destabilising power.
Among the acclaimed new releases, perhaps only All of Us Strangers shows physical intimacy as a potentially healing force. But it chiefly satisfies the demands of the story, rather than merely emitting an erotic charge.
