Daily Mail February 1, 2012
We’ve been watching quite a lot of frantic sex in our house over the past few weeks. It happens every year at this time, when BAFTA, the film and TV society for professionals, begin counting the votes for their annual awards ceremony in February, and DVDs of the latest movies are delivered to the homes of its 6,500 voting members.
In this way, along with the usual adventures of spies, detectives, criminals, pirates, vampires, wizards and quirky talking toys, the modern way of sex reaches us.
Or does it? Somehow I doubt it. I mean, if everyone in the country was having sex the way it’s portrayed in most of the movies we’ve been watching recently, it would suggest we’re living in a nation of super-athletes. And a look at any bus queue tells us we’re not.
There was a time when Hollywood bedroom scenes demanded that one foot stay on the floor at all times. As that was plainly impossible for anyone but a couple of contortionists, it was, of course, never tried, and, as was the intention, there was no sex on screen.
Then we got to the Doris Day/Rock Hudson romantic type of comedies where young, attractive, married couples in pyjamas would climb into single beds alongside each other, and, after a couple lines of more or less snappy dialogue, put out the bedside light and go to sleep. If anything, that was even more unlikely.
But was it any more foolish than the way movie sex is now so frequently portrayed, where the actors seem to have been given the direction “bonk as though your life depended on it, as athletically as you can and we’ll add all kinds of exaggerated sounds to make it even more exciting”.
Were these the instructions given to Daniel Craig before he and that Girl With The Dragon Tattoo went at it with such gusto, or to Michael Fassbender before he pretended to do similar things with all manner of people, and in all kinds of manic ways, in Shame?
Admittedly Fassbender was playing a sex addict, so I suppose some over-diligence might be expected in his case. But the bed crashing, the pulsating gasps, the sound effects magnified off the register, and the naked prostitute being addressed against a plate glass window half way up a glass tower block…?
I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen a lot of tower block windows in my life, but I’ve never seen that. I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t care. And when you don’t believe or care in a movie it isn’t working for you.
For the same reason I didn’t believe last year’s champion in the over-athletic bonking stakes either. That was Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right – but it didn’t seem right at all. On the contrary, it was absurd that her character, a lesbian, would suddenly get such a hetero rush for Mark Ruffalo that she went into what looked like frenzied, comic mortal combat with the guy.
I suppose the thinking behind such exaggerated displays of passion is, taking a lead from the porn industry, the more torrid the scene, the more we see and hear, the more entertained we’ll be.
But is that really the case? It seems to me that for sex scenes to really work as the film makers intend, the viewer has to identify with the characters and the emotions being depicted on the screen. Like porn, sex as a spectator sport can quickly become boring.
Despite the legend, it was tedious in the first of the much over-hyped Hollywood bonkathons, Don’t Look Now, which showed Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland at it like over intimate wrestlers. Poetic? I don’t think so. That was in the Seventies, and it was downright ridiculous by the Nineties when Jeremy Irons acted out his trysts with Juliette Binoche in Damage.
I know Irons was playing the part of an MP, so, I suppose, all things are possible, but the scenes of him banging the lady’s head on the floor in mid-passion were neither romantic, nor erotic. People in the cinema I attended laughed out loud. I wondered whether the movie should have been retitled Brain Damage.
Obviously viewers like to see attractive people without their clothes, be it in films, advertisements in magazines or on canvas framed on the walls of art galleries. That’s just the way we humans are. But by turning sex on screen into a display of strength, energy, physical suppleness with off the board sound effects added it seems to me the entire point is being lost.
Which brings me to an example of where, if we are to have depictions of a sexual nature on screen, and why not, it works rather better: Birdsong, the BBC’s two part adaptation of love, infidelity and the First World War.
Yes, there’s a lot of rolling around between glistening, starched white sheets, and the odd peeps at the unembarrassed breasts of a beautiful French actress called Clémence Poésy, but there are no gymnastics.
There doesn’t have to be. Having watched an hour of the soon-to-be lovers catching each others’ eyes and touching ankles, we are as much in love with the idea of them being in love, or, at least, in an enhanced state of mutual lust, as the characters are themselves.
That’s how it is, or was, some of us will remember – or at least, that’s
how we wished it had been.
In other words we, the audience, are not just uninvolved voyeurs of the passion, but feel we are the characters themselves. Now I know at my time of life, or indeed at any time of my life, I never looked much like Eddie Redmayne, but on Sunday night it was me that Clémence Poésy was looking at with those extraordinary eyes.
And I’m pretty sure there were a few million married ladies around the country, who were thinking what she seemed to be thinking, as she gazed at young Eddie. That’s the magic of passion on the screen when it’s done right.
Obviously this filmic strand of Birdsong is just upmarket, literary Mills & Boon really, pretty people, gorgeous French setting, hot summer, stolen moments, impossible desire, all those clothes to take off, etc.. But at heart I bet most viewers (with the possible exception of hormone booming teenage boys with their Inbetweeners comic smut) are a lot closer to Mills & Boon in their romantic fantasies than to Hollywood’s utilitarian bonkathons.
And as someone who sees an awful lot of athleticism masquerading as desire on screen whenever the BAFTAS come around, it’s a rather welcome relief.
