Movie Lust: Are the Steamy Sex Scenes Real?
"So, is all that ... you know ... real?"
Just the suggestion of actual sex is enough
to pique the world's interest,
and for the film to take its place alongside
those other titles alleged to have gone
that extra few inches in the name of realism
The Postman Always Rings Twice
The Naked Truth [Original]
Rumors are rife that the sex in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
was all for real - but should we care either way?
Until recently, asking a friend if they'd seen the new Ang Lee movie yet might still have marked you out as something of a sophisticate, a savvy cultural voyager (or possibly just a big fan of The Hulk).
From now on, however, you'll need to tread more carefully - with the intensely graphic sex scenes in Lee's forthcoming Lust, Caution having already reduced most discussion of the film among critics to the single question: "So, is all that ... you know ... real?"
Not that Lee will tip his hand - leaving the world to judge for itself whether the feverish couplings of co-stars Tony Leung and Tang Wei are the genuine article.
And yet (as Lee will surely know), just the suggestion of actual sex is enough to pique the world's interest, and for the film to take its place alongside those other titles alleged to have gone that extra few inches in the name of realism.
For some (Don't Look Now, The Postman Always Rings Twice), just the rumoured presence of verité nookie was enough to lend them an eternal notoriety.
For others, the issue was easier to confirm - having chosen to appear as his own stunt man for the sex scenes in his 1971 blaxploitation opus Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, director and star Melvin van Peebles first contracted gonorrhea, then secured compensation from the Director's Guild for having "got hurt on the job."
More recently though, the trickle of such filthy curios as the infamous In the Realm of the Senses (with its novel interpretation of the phrase "go to work on an egg") has become a deluge - one so pron
ounced it's amazing Lee's coy non-disclosure can still command such attention. Back in the late nineties, France led the way: the unapologetic likes of Romance, Baise-Moi and Pola X each putting it all out there in the most palpable fashion.
Shortly thereafter, it became difficult to set foot in an arthouse cinema without being confronted with an earnest Kerry Fox orally attending to Mark Rylance's penis in the gloomy Intimacy ... or a similarly focused Chloe Sevigny pleasuring Vincent Gallo in the latter's The Brown Bunny ... or by Ana Mushkadiz with a tubby Marcos Hernandez in Mexico's Battle in Heaven ... while God knows, mere blowjobs were only the beginning in the dizzying Shortbus, or Larry Clark's typically grotty Ken Park ...
And so on. Yet did all this frantic congress add a priceless note of authenticity to the films concerned, or just another layer of bullshit?
Can I really have been the only person who found Choi Min-sik eating a live octopus in Oldboy a far more visceral and compelling breakdown of the line between fake and real than the dreary 9 Songs' pair of unknown actors briskly humping before going out to see Franz Ferdinand?
Sex changes in the presence of a camera, because it's no longer the business of the two people involved, but all about the third party - the viewer.
What's always been dishonest about the likes of 9 Songs and The Brown Bunny is the slippery appeal to the audience that the sex is somehow scaling new heights of raw and fearless truth - when, in fact, it's just another performance sold as a non-performance, like everything else you see in a film.
It's just that, rather than the strange, hairless, sheeny creatures of actual porn, you've got Tony Leung or Chloe Sevigny demonstrating their commitment to their craft.
Not only is it all completely bogus, the results are usually far from erotic (although people find dogging erotic, so what do I know?) - more importantly, they're not even dramatically potent.
To me, the best sex scene in cinema remains that of Don't Look Now, the crucial detail being that (on-screen) there's really no way of knowing whether it's real or not (although Donald Sutherland has something to say about it here).
It's immaterial - because its power didn't come through biological accuracy, but the emotional backdrop against which it took place, Nicholas Roeg's direction, and yes, the performances of the actors.
All of which means that a conclusively bona fide shot of Donald Sutherland's hirsute knackers swinging away mid-relations would have been not only irrelevant, but outright detrimental.
Let's face it, with sex on film, Laurence Oliver still put it best (albeit in a different context): "Try acting, dear boy."
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