A discussion on sex in movies doesn’t necessarily have to devolve into an exhaustive symposium on whether Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie actually “acted” during a certain scene in Don’t Look Now or the wider cultural significance of the ménage-a-trois in Wild Things: here are ten movies that push the boundaries – in one way or another – of on-screen sex: good sex, bad sex, downright bizarre sex. Scenes that have the only common denominator of being so utterly anarchistic they are almost unjustified. Bring it on.
10. Everyone in Crash (Cronenberg, 1996)
Orgasmic car wrecks, automobile fetishism and underground perversion: such thrills-through-extreme measures wouldn’t have worked in anyone else’s hands. But this is Cronenberg we are talking about: the movie exhausts nearly every possible combination of sexual partners available to it and still manages to repulse.
All of the sex makes it sound like porn, but porn this isn’t. Buckle your seatbelts.
9. Anonymous French people in The Good Old Naughty Days (Reilhac, 2002)
Any presumption about the ostensible asexual prudishness of the 1920s was forever dashed when director Michel Reilhac dug up this silent-era collection of twelve single-reel French porn films that together compound to more raunch, hilarity and ludicrous sodomization than your local x-rated video store could ever hope to stock. If ever there were taboos, your French grandparents didn’t know them. With setups ranging from the porn-friendly (teachers spanking naughty schoolgirls, a smutty reworking of Puccini’s Madame Bovary and homosexual rape) to the weird (heart attack-inducing mouthjobs) to the downright nasty (bestiality and nunsploitation), this porn collection is at least three steps ahead of anything you could legally (or illegally) rent right now. How times change.
8. Selma Blair and Robert Wisdom in Storytelling (Solondz, 2001)
In another of Solondz’ damning eviscerations of suburban family disfunction Selma Blair is humped up against a wall by her black, “whitey”-hating creative arts professor while being told to shout “Fuck me nigger!”. This is Solondz taking an (ironically) negative stance on political incorrectness and controversy by, well, being politically incorrect and controversial. Too bad, then, that his esoteric Americana is often as austere as this “sex” scene: the red box the scene was deliberately presented with was not so much a middle finger at the “establishment” as a nonsense shock tactic without the shock part. Next!
7. Everyone in The Idiots (Von Trier, 1998)
Looking for sex in a Dogme movie is a bit like expecting romance in a Meg Ryan film: it’s there even if it isn’t shown. Von Trier’s self-important scattershot satire worked conspicuously well on a proto-philosophical level. It’s the little details he got carried away with. A graphic, all-out, spazzing orgy involving a group of middle class individuals feigning idiocy by pretending to be mentally retarded was, in many ways, an unpalatable slap in the face to common decency and the “Look at us, we are pseudo-liberal communards who fuck like hippies” message in many ways failed to get across. We cringed, yawned and, finally, laughed.
6. Ned Beatty and Crazy Hillbilly in Deliverance (Boorman, 1972)
If images of a bare-chested Burt Reynolds braving the “the last un-fucked up river of the South” in a sleeveless wetsuit weren’t conspicuously subliminal enough, director John Boorman sexed out any remaining credibility by tarting the movie up with a “sex” moment that was, at once, unsexy and hilarious: Ned Beatty forced to strip naked and made to squeal like a pig while Crazy Hillbilly butt-rapes him from the back. A tender tale of two men bonding in the woods, no less. That the rest of this classic film went downhill from there has, I suspect, something to do with it.
5. Alejandro Ferretis and Magaldena Flores in Japon (Reygadas, 2002)
Disguised beneath layers of consummate reconnaissance, Reygadas’ sparsely scripted tale of self-discovery opened surely enough, as an innocuous homage to Tarkovsky and the heart-rending Mexican countryside. Not quite. Just before going all Malick on us, Reygadas blows up all traces of spiritual jolt and any suggestion of transcendence he might have intimated by propelling a marihuana-smoking 80-year old granny in bed with a depressed, gimpy painter half her age without attempting to conceal anything. Unnecessary, unlikely, unsexy, but we all watched it.
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