Meet slick corporate titan James Wheeler (Mickey Rourke). He likes helicopters, cars, motorbikes, boardroom takeovers and having complete erotic control over submissive women. He was abused as a child, doesn't like to be touched, and in almost every other way possible he articulates the character template for Fifty Shades of Grey's Christian Grey. He even speaks in that same halting, slightly sick-making, so-pervy-it's-sexy (yeah, right) prose beloved of …Grey creator EL James.
For example, when out for a flirtatious stroll with potential conquest Emily (Carré Otis), Wheeler suddenly falls back and starts leering at Emily's arse, Benny Hill-style. When she asks him what's up, he simply smiles, super cool, half-winking at the boys in the audience, and sighs, "I just like watching you walk!" Wow, what a ladykiller!
And yet the eerie prescience of Wild Orchid is not what makes it great, or why it is one of the definitive moments in the history of movie sex. No, the film, written and directed by Zalman King, demands our attention because it is the literal, and chronological, highpoint of Eighties Hollywood erotica. Before it, 1986's 9 ½ Weeks (which King also co-wrote and produced, with Rourke in the lead role as yet another pervy bully) and Fatal Attraction (1987) had marked the parameters for a genre that would speak of liberal sexual permissiveness but was actually about conservative sexual fear (AIDS, anyone?). But Wild Orchid topped them both. For with its lurid Latin setting (Wheeler is in Buenos Aires to buy a hotel, as you do), rampantly fornicating locals and the suggestion that, if you opened the window of your limousine you were likely to get hit by flying spunk, it had the edge on the competition.
Best of all, it boasts a closing sex scene (Wheeler and Emily in lotus, shot mostly from above, sparing no blushes) so protracted and explicit it troubled the censors (the film was originally rated X). It was shot to a $100m payday, and raised the great debate, not seen since Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don't Look Now (1973), that asks, "Were they or weren't they? You know? Doing it for real?" In 2011, Otis finally addressed the issue, "Have you ever filmed a sex scene? Do you have any idea how many people were standing around? It was mortifying!" So, that's a no then?
9 | Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)
Art house movies. We get it. They do sex. That's their thing. From Swedish nudes in 1953 (Summer with Monika) to the butter-based penetration of 1972 (Last Tango in Paris) to crazy irascible beach-side sessions in 1986 (Betty Blue), nothing screams "art house" more than a smartly directed and gamely acted sex scene. Then came Blue is the Warmest Colour.
The film, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, wiped away everything that had gone before it. The hideous rape of Monica Bellucci in Irreversible (2002)? The grimly determined humping from Japanese 1976 classic In the Realm of the Senses? All gone. Faded in comparison. Plus, it was gay sex. So it made the cutesy girl-on-girl action in Bound (2006) and Mulholland Drive (2001) seem dubious and cheap. And the boy-on-boy action in Brokeback Mountain (2005)? Just lame.
Instead, what it gave us was two young and relatively untested actresses, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, deftly describing, in the grim northern French town of Lille, the heady emotional rushes and sudden power shifts of an emerging relationship. Looks are exchanged, picnics are arranged, kisses are traded and then everything grinds to a halt at approximately one hour and 11 minutes into the movie, when director Kechiche and his two lead actresses deliver the type of jaw-to-the-floor sex scene that has subsequently raised the movie-sex bar to insane heights of verisimilitude and has pushed the literal definition of "simulated" to breaking point.
For here, over seven long breathy, sweaty, brightly-lit minutes, we run the unapologetic gamut of licking, sucking, squeezing, fingering, rimming, ramming, slamming, and general slithery, grindy, intercrural mayhem.
The scene has many detractors including the actresses themselves, who famously rounded on their director: Seydoux said making it was "horrible" and she would "never" work with Kechiche again. Once the film began sweeping up during the 2013 awards season, however, they recanted and said that they were "happy" with it. And yet, look at the scene now, within the movie, and away from the hype, and it doesn't play too well. It's crudely lit. It's brazen, and yet also crass. And what it says, in its many nipple shots, arse close-ups, and vaginal teases, is that perhaps all sex scenes, no matter how well-intended, or how groundbreaking and profound, are inherently, well, kind of sleazy.
8 | Tarzan, the Ape Man (1981)
"I've never touched a man before!" It's Bo Derek as Jane, kneeling over an unconscious Tarzan (Miles O'Keeffe) in their first screen encounter after 45 minutes of solo swimming, snake-dodging and needless knocker action on behalf of Jane and her lovingly photographed breasts (photographed, I might add, by director-husband John Derek, so that's OK). Tarzan is lying on the sand in his trademark loincloth and, oddly, a funky headband. Undeterred by the outfit, Jane starts touching. "It's nice," she says, going slowly, yet directly, for the crotch. "It's very nice!"
Tarzan, clearly uncomfortable with the whole date-rapey vibe, leaps back into action dragging the movie through a series of strange, breast-based set-pieces that climax in a quirky "native jungle village" (actual location: Sri Lanka). The film, of course, is genius. No, really. Because it parlayed over 20 years of Russ Meyer sexploitation flicks (see Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, 1965), and so-called "Nudie Cutie" stag films into a mainstream, studio-financed, money-making event.
And what an event! There was a much-hyped lawsuit from Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs' estate, orders for nudity cuts from the studio, and publicised cries of "censorship!" from director Derek.
The film, which cost about $6m to make, made $37m at the box office (equivalent to a blockbuster like The Dark Knight today taking more than a billion dollars) and proved that in mainstream cinema the rubric established 40 years previously by Jane Russell in The Outlaw (see # 1) still held true, and was more relevant than ever, namely: tits sell.
7 | Monster's Ball (2001)
Something happened with sex scenes around the millennium. They went from being slightly tawdry (Angel Heart, 1987), titillating (Risky Business, 1983) and tacky (Porky's, 1982) to dramatically satisfying and, ultimately, Oscar-worthy. Kate Winslet in 2008's The Reader (Nazi sex), Charlize Theron in 2003's Monster (serial killer lesbian sex), Michelle Williams in 2010's Blue Valentine (Gosling sex), and Maria Bello in A History of Violence (2005) got a Golden Globe nomination for dress-up as a cheerleader then a bit-of-rough-on-the-stairs sex.
Nowhere is the switch more evident than in Monster's Ball, where former B-list actress Halle Berry snagged the Best Actress Oscar partially because of the "bravery" she displayed during the terrifying sex scene. "Terrifying" because Berry's playing the date-from-hell against Billy Bob Thornton's straight man. He's a prison guard who meets her in a diner. She's grieving for her dead son. He takes her home. They drink whiskey. She starts blubbing. Thornton puts a nervous hand on her shoulder. "Er, I'm not sure what you want me to do?" he says, tentatively. Then, wham, she pulls down her top and starts chanting, "Make me feel good! Can you make me feel good?"
Naturally, he goes for it (good man, Billy Bob!), but you just know that he's keeping one eye open, in case she tries to clatter him across the back of the head. Thus follows five minutes of raw therapeutic ramming, artfully intercut with close-ups of hands freeing a birdie from its cage (hang on! I think I get this metaphor! Give me a second! Is it to do with freedom?). Director Forster said: "When I spoke to Billy Bob and Halle, I told them it was important that these two emotionally repressed characters start the sex scene raw and animalistic. They express everything that has been repressed for years." Of course, we all totally got that. So did the Oscar voters.
6 | Body of Evidence (1993)
I met Willem Dafoe recently and I asked him about Body of Evidence. The film, in which he stars as a lawyer in rainy Portland, Oregon, defending a part-time gallery owner and full-time dominatrix (Madonna) charged with murder-by-vagina, is generally derided as a giggle-inducing, all-time cinematic low. Perhaps typically, or not, Dafoe had much to defend in the film. He liked playing the bitch to Madonna's butch. He was disappointed with the marketing hype that revolved around Madonna's nudity. And mostly, he felt that Madonna became an unhelpful "symbol" for the bad buzz around the film.
"The timing was wrong, and it got presented the wrong way," he said. "Because it was essentially an old-fashioned courtroom movie, which I got a kick out of, where I'm almost like the woman's role and she's the man. And in the end, it was one of those cases where the symbol of the movie began to matter more than what the movie actually was, even for those people who hadn't seen it."
And certainly, re-watched today, Body of Evidence is not any more preposterous or poorly acted than, say, Sea of Love (1989), Basic Instinct (1992), Sliver (1993), Disclosure (1994), or any one of the vapid, push-button Hollywood flesh-fests that came before or after it (although you possibly haven't lived until you've seen Madonna square up to Dafoe and hiss, "Have you ever seen animals make love, Frank? It's intense!"). And neither is its depiction of straight-faced, lip-quivering S&M rituals (melted wax on cock, broken bulbs in back) any more absurd than those enacted by Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter, Juliette Binoche in Damage (1992) or Emmanuelle Seigner in Bitter Moon. Instead, what remains in Body of Evidence, and very much so, is a profound sense of the ridiculous ("That's what I do, Frank. I fuck!" says Madonna at the film's climax).
It proves something common to all S&M movies, and all films that take sex very seriously indeed (yes, that means you, Fifty Shades of Grey), is that, sometimes, it behooves all film-makers to be aware that sex is also, in its essence, never without humour (see # 3).
TO BE CONTINUED >>>>>>>>>>>>>
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