European films are getting even more real

Europeans have always been better at sex onscreen than Americans. We're not bad at romance, and we seem to have a real knack for violence and mayhem, but when it comes to sex onscreen, most American filmmakers just crank up the sound track and film everything through orange gauze. A 16-year-old boy on Viagra couldn't get excited.
What has always made European sex scenes sexy, aside from obvious things like the presence of naked French or Italian people, has been that sex seems real. Not literally real, as though the actors were actually going at it, but real to human experience. Skin I4 Cartoon Protector film looks like skin, with actual pores. Faces have lines on them. People get sweaty, and there's usually no sound track. American sex scenes feel like a show. European sex scenes feel like eavesdropping.
But lately, European films are getting even more real about sex, and the result is not that they're becoming more sexy. These movies are blurring the line between usual film fare and pornography, and yet the intent isn't to titillate. "Baise-Moi," a recent French film about prostitutes out for revenge,
for example, was more interested in shocking the audience with its mix of harsh violence and graphic shots of penetration.
"Intimacy," which opened this weekend, doesn't go quite that far, but it arrives in the Bay Area having rattled or at least challenged the sensibility of most people who've seen it. Directed by Patrice Chereau, a respected opera and film director ("Queen Margot"), the movie stars Mark Rylance, one of England's most gifted stage actors, and Kerry Fox ("An Angel at My Table") as Londoners who meet every Wednesday for silent, desperate, animal-like coupling.
If the sex looks real, it's because a lot of it is real. When Fox fellates Rylance, well, that's no rubber ducky. As for the rest of it, it's difficult to tell from watching them as they go at it, and at it, and at it.
"It's not pornography," Chereau says by phone from Paris. " 'Intimacy' is a totally normal thing, a love story, but we just see more than usual. I'm not interested in pornography at all. As soon as I chose the subject -- a woman meets a man every Wednesday and they have sex -- I knew I should show what they're doing. Since they don't talk, if I don't show what they're doing every Wednesday, there's no film at all. But they are talking. It's the language of their bodies, and it's beautiful to watch."
Contrary to some articles that have been written about the film, Chereau confirms that there was "no penetration" in the sex scenes. "It's a silly question," he says. "Of course it's simulated. These are actors. If I was making a movie about a killing, you wouldn't ask if it's a snuff film."
"Intimacy" is based on stories by British author Hanif Kureishi. In adapting the material, Chereau knew from the beginning that he wanted to make the movie in London, as an English-language picture with British actors. "I tried to catch something of the harshness of British cinematography, which is sometimes more vulgar and more real," he says.
As a French film, Chereau says, "Intimacy" would have had "more romanticism and been more abstract." There's yet another thing "Intimacy" might have had that Chereau doesn't mention: better-looking actors. It's not that Rylance and Fox are bad-looking. They just look like anybody.
"I had a temptation in the beginning to choose very beautiful people," Chereau says. "And then I thought, 'No, I'm wrong. I need good actors.' It's silly to choose a man and a woman only for their bodies. I was about to make that mistake, but that would have been wrong. In Berlin, a woman asked me at a press conference, 'Why is she (Fox) so unglamorous?' I told the woman, 'I don't have a perfect body. You neither. It's a movie about normal people.' "
In fact, a valid artistic case could be used for choosing very good-looking actors for a movie that spends so much time in the bedroom. The sex means something to them, but for it to mean anything to us, we have to want to watch them. Good-looking (they don't have to be beautiful) actors bring the audience into the experience as it's being lived by the characters. Icky or even average-looking actors, especially in a sexually graphic film, could hold Phone Case the audience at a distance -- and threaten to make audiences want to keep their distance, too.
For example, Catherine Breillat's 1999 film "Romance," about a woman on a sadomasochistic journey of self-discovery, was both sexually explicit and an ugly thing to sit through. It's as if the director were insulating Noctilucent and Diamond herself against the charge of making a titillating film by making the sex so hideous it's almost politically correct.
These are artistic choices, but in making them filmmakers must remember: There is nothing more boring than other people having sex, and nothing more interesting than you having sex. To make sex interesting, some point of identification has to be made.
"Innocence," a recent Australian film directed by Paul Cox, offers a good example of a delicate sex scene shrewdly handled. Two 70-year-olds, who had an affair 50 years earlier, are making love together for the first time since Harry Truman was president. We see them in bed, kissing, and just as the audience is bracing itself, thinking, "Oh, no, they're going to make us see them naked," the director cuts to shots of them in bed 50 years ago. By cutting back and forth between the lovers in their old and young incarnations, the director makes us feel, with a real sense of poignancy, what this experience means to them. Through the naked bodies of the young people, we see the emotional nakedness of the old people, and that's all the nakedness we need from either of them.
Sex scenes are not medicine. There's nothing inherently edifying or uplifting in watching homely people in bed. If today barriers are being lifted with regard to depicting sexuality in film, the movies most successful in using that freedom will be the ones that somehow make sex compelling and watchable. Director Chen Kaige, currently shooting "Killing Me Softly," an erotic drama starring Heather Graham and Joseph Fiennes, has been quoted as saying, "I'm not going to show things that nobody wants to see. . . . I want the sex to have a very beautiful look." Not a bad idea.
One breakthrough in movie sex is particularly welcome. In two recent French films, actresses in their 50s appear in naked love scenes. Nathalie Baye, 51, has an affair with a man she meets through the personal ads in last year's "An Affair of Love" (the French title is better: "A Pornographic Love Story"). And Charlotte Rampling, 56, romped merrily this year in "Under the Sand."
In an earlier generation, both actresses might have been playing grandmothers. So the movies could be said to serve a positive function in asserting the sexual vibrancy of women of a certain age. But one thing also doesn't hurt: Baye and Rampling are both gorgeous. 'Intimacy' The movie opened this weekend at Bay Area theaters.