4. Willem Dafoe and Barbara Hershey in The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese, 1988)
It’s been called blasphemous, denounced by Christian communities across the world, threatened to be deleted. Yet Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, a pinnacle of infamous cinema, is not the religious porn film you read about. Christ on the cross is tempted with visions of a life with Mary Magdalene, replete with sex, marriage, and children. Yes, the “sex scene” lasts for a mere few seconds, but it feels longer than that. Just ask Mel Gibson.
3. Nacho Pérez and Raúl García Forneiro in Bad Education (Almodovar, 2004)
Classic Almodovar: Two young Catholic-school boys mutually masturbating each other in a Franco-era movie house. What Almodovar was advancing as emotional repression and educational hypochrisy we were close to denouncing as gratuitous fornication. But the “ick” factor was soon shattered with Almodovar treating the encounter as more of a fleeting afternoon game than the forbidden sexual awakening of two boys in a Catholic boarding school in the 1960s. It still raised eyebrows, but the contextualisation of the “incident” was unpretentiously elegiac: somehow, seeing it wasn’t as bad as thinking about it.
2. Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986)
Obvious choice, but unavoidable. Attempting to distill any of Blue Velvet’s sumptuous complexity down to a few short lines would be like pretending I understand any of the Illiad in original Greek. Frank “I’ll fuck anything that moves” Booth’s curious idea of foreplay was right up Dorothy Vallens’ alley – the crotch-humping, velvet-eating, oxygen-sniffing sadomasochistic rapefest detonated into a reality so perplexing it threatened to clobber our dreams to sanity – and, every now and then, it still does.
1. Marlon Brando and Maria Schenider in Last Tango In Paris (Bertolucci, 1972)
When asked to get some butter from the kitchen, little did Jeanne, the 20-year old French nymphette played by a very game Maria Schneider, know dinner would be served “at home”. X-rated on release in ’72, Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris had moments sizeably more brutal than the butter-through-the-backdoor incident, but none tops it in terms of sheer vulgarity and utter hilarity. Despite emerging from Bertolucci’s own perverted desire to bone an anonymous woman he once saw, thirty years and a million jokes later, the movie remains a staple for both food-lovers and sex fanatics still trying to figure out whether butter is, in fact, better than margarine.
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