Has porn entered mainstream cinema for good?
by Mark Kermode, The Guardian
Trash maestro John Waters, director of such cult classics as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, once told me that he believed one of the last taboos of cinema would be broken when A-list Hollywood stars performed actual sex acts on screen. Only then would we know that hard-core pornography, once the preserve of the underground and the illegal, had finally been totally absorbed by the mainstream. Judging by several of the movies I saw at Cannes this year, that day is not so far away.
A firm favourite among the titles officially selected to play out of competition at Cannes was Shortbus, a largely likable, tragicomic drama about a group of New Yorkers with intertwining relationship troubles filmed with what the press notes coyly refer to as ‘sexual frankness’.
Sure enough, the film opens with one key character ‘blowing his own horn’ (no, I didn’t know it was possible either), and then proceeds amiably through a roundelay of gay and straight sex scenes all of which serve the plot, and often the comedy, of John Cameron Mitchell’s eye-opening film. The performers, who helped devise their own character scenarios, are – crucially – all passable actors, who do far more than merely bare their bodies.
Elsewhere, in the Cannes Critics’ Week selection, Destricted showcased name directors such as Larry Clark and Gaspar Noe joining forces with renowned artists such as Sam Taylor-Wood and Matthew Barney to produce work on the subject of sex and pornography. Their remit was to make films which were ‘explicit, but legal’ as part of an ongoing project. Thus, we were treated to the sight of a man having sex with a 50-ton Caterpillar truck (no, I hadn’t seen that before either), someone masturbating in Death Valley, and a dopey slacker selecting and then having anal sex with a ‘hot porno chick’. The applause was rapturous.
Over the past few years, Cannes has developed a reputation for championing porno chic, much of it thoroughly meretricious. Back in the late 1990s, I got thrown out of a screening of Lars von Trier’s imbecilic The Idiots for heckling a fatuous, hard-core sex scene which was provoking cries of ‘Bravo’ from the boorish cognoscenti. Last year, the equally empty-headed Mexican movie, Battle in Heaven, received a standing ovation for no reason that I could discern other than the fact that it started and ended with a blowjob.
It was at an unofficial Cannes screening in 2004 that the press first caught sight of Michael Winterbottom’s clinically dull 9 Songs, a collection of hard-core sex scenes interspersed with live footage of rock concerts, in which the songs were far and away the most interesting ingredient. As for the execrable Brown Bunny, a film widely acknowledged to be the worst film ever shown in Cannes, this has passed into legend as ‘the movie in which Chloe Sevigny goes down on Vincent Gallo’, seemingly the only remarkable feature of this irredeemable celluloid wreck.
Away from the Croisette, the encroachment of hard-core imagery into mainstream cinema seems ubiquitous, facilitated, in part, by a laudable relaxation of censorship standards in the UK. Where once it was only European directors such as Catherine Breillat who flirted with porn (her dull-as-ditchwater international hit, Romance, featured hard-core stud Rocco Siff redi doing what he does best), now everyone seems eager to jump on the bandwagon. New Zealand-born film-maker Jane Campion, director of the international award winner, The Piano, returned to Cannes this year with her short film, The Water Diary, a lyrical, child’s-eye view of drought which warned gently against global warming.
But Campion’s recent New York crime thriller, In the Cut, incurred the wrath of US censors for the inclusion of what appeared to be an explicit (and narratively pivotal) blowjob. Campion protested that the scene was not hard-core (which is defined as ‘real’ rather than ‘simulated’ sex) because the phallus in question was a prosthetic; as Campion told me, she would never ask an actress to perform oral sex. Not so the makers of the Anglo-French film, Intimacy, in which Kerry Fox gets famously close to Mark Rylance in a manner which boldly straddles the divide between fact and fiction, reminding us of John Waters’s prophetic predictions about name actors breaking the last taboo.
Whether all this is a good thing is a matter of debate. I find that whenever hard-core imagery rears its head within narrative cinema, the fictional world of the film is momentarily destroyed. Suddenly, I don’t see the characters interacting in a manner that serves the plot. Instead, I see actors doing something other than ‘acting’, and start to wonder what they thought about on their way to work that morning (or what they’ll talk about when they get home that evening).
This wasn’t a problem with Shortbus, since none of the performers was familiar to me, and all seemed so utterly at ease with the sexuality they portrayed that I simply believed that they were the characters they were playing. But if Robert De Niro were to take method acting to its natural conclusion and actually shag someone on-screen, I’m pretty certain that the grand illusion of the drama would simply melt away, leaving us with the spectacle of a famous person having sex, in the manner of Pam and Tommy, Paris Hilton, or any other star of those saddo ‘celebrity sex tapes’.
For me, the most convincing sex scene on celluloid occurs between a husband and wife played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now. For years, rumours have flown that the actors actually ‘went the extra yard’, although the film does not substantiate such allegations. Rather, the sheer power of the surrounding drama made it all seem real – more ‘real’ than the verite language of hard-core ever could. As for the rise of unsimulated, onscreen antics among name stars, I am reminded of the advice Laurence Olivier reportedly gave Dustin Hoffman after he’d stayed up all night in order to appear suitably dishevelled for a scene in Marathon Man: ‘Dear boy, why not try acting? It’s much easier.’
A pox on popcorn
At a recent press screening of the disaster movie remake Poseidon, critics were plied with bags of popcorn, presumably to put them in the right frame of mind to judge this unashamed piece of fluff. I wondered whether encouraging people to eat the noisiest food known to mankind was such a great idea. We’ve all grown used to those announcements telling us to turn off our mobile phones and, indeed, critics now regularly have their cellphones confiscated for fear that they might use them to pirate the movie. Yet the sound that now echoes around multiplexes is that of the rustling, chewing and slurping of an ever-expanding range of cinema snacks. It’s true that missing some of the dialogue of a movie like Poseidon wouldn’t matter, but isn’t it time we added ‘no eating’ to the ‘no smoking’ and ‘no talking’ rules? After all, you wouldn’t eat in church, would you?