A rchive Date
[ 03-10-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
|
[Women filmmakers put the X in sex
By ERIC HARRISON
Copyright 2000 Houston Chronicle
Sept. 30, 2000, 8:52PM
'In every process of transfiguration and also in every taboo, there is something that scares us. Even the movement toward debasement. I consider it some sort of transcendence in reverse, toward the lower depths.' - Catherine Breillat, director of 'Romance'
Remember Thelma & Louise, the liberating road movie from 1991 that essentially remade Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with modern women?
Imagine if that film had starred two hot young porn stars, instead of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, and that the costumes came mostly from Frederick's of Hollywood. Now add a dollop of fashionable French ennui and a heaping helping of gore. Translate it into French and stick on subtitles, and you've got Baise Moi, a new film that premiered last month at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The English title is Rape Me (although a literal translation would include an obscenity), and that tells you all you need to know about the filmmakers' agenda. The film, which has sparked protests and was censored in France, is a 76-minute assault on bourgeoise sensibilities.
Baise Moi was only one of several movies shown at North America's pre-eminent film festival that reveled in shocking or explicit sexual imagery and one of two - both directed by women - that attracted attention for displaying actual sex acts.
The inclusion of real sex in movies intended for general adult audiences is starting to move from oddity to trend. Congress is in an uproar over violence, but there is a heightened sexuality in mainstream movies that seems to coincide both with what social scientists say is a loosening of the sexual caution that followed the discovery of AIDS and also with a burgeoning mainstream interest in pornography.
This fascination with pornography can be seen not only in the exploding sales of so-called adult videos and the huge growth of pornographic Internet sites but also perhaps in the release of movies such as Boogie Nights and The People vs. Larry Flynt.
Last year, two documentaries about female porn stars debuted at American film festivals. One - Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, about a woman who had sex 251 times in 10 hours (with about 100 men) - got national distribution and played in Houston at the Landmark River Oaks theater. Additionally, a new movie about a legendary porn actor is about to be released. Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes will be shown at the Rice Media Center Saturday and Oct. 8.
The new mainstream interest in pornography also has given birth to upscale magazines such as Richardson and Nerve, which boasts well-known contributors and touts itself as a purveyor of "literate smut." And the simulated sexuality of movies such as Crash and Eyes Wide Shut may also be viewed as part of the trend.
The development disturbs critics such as historian Rochelle Gurstein. In her 1998 book The Repeal of Reticence (Hill & Wang Publishing, $15), she decries the continual raising of the threshold of what is considered acceptable.
"One of the defining qualities of sophisticated modern people is that nothing shocks them," she said when the book was published. "The consequence of not having a sense of shame, and believing that nothing is sacred, is a world that looks like ours."
What is noteworthy about Baise Moi and some of the other movies - including one based on a sexually explicit novel that Jane Campion now is making with Nicole Kidman - is that they were made by women. It's doubtful men could get away with making them and still be considered serious artists. And titillation, the filmmakers argue, isn't their avowed aim.
The sex in these movies often is intertwined with violence; the films examine disturbing aspects of human psychology and need. Campion's last movie, Holy Smoke, starred Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel and drew a parallel between obsessive sexual attraction and religious faith. She says the unflinchingly honest way In the Cut deals with female sexuality is what drew her to the Susanna Moore novel (Onyx Books, $6.99).
It focuses on a New York linguist who becomes sexually involved with a man she comes to believe is a serial killer. What is most disturbing about the book is the suggestion that the woman is seeking her own death.
Campion says she will alter the story to remove that suggestion and her movie won't feature real sex, but she speaks admiringly of the novel as "possibly the most frightening, alarming and erotic piece of literature I've read in a long time.
"I was actually shocked, frightened by the end of it, really alarmed," she said in an interview. "I mean horrified."
This is the sort of unsettling sexual territory French writer and filmmaker Catherine Breillat has explored in her movies and novels. Men and women in her work, for all the sex they share, don't seem to like each other. Sex for her characters is both transcendent and filled with anguish and sometimes death.
Parfait Amour! (Perfect Love!), her 1996 movie , included brief shots of oral sex (in the background of scenes), but what many French women objected to most was its portrayal of a woman's obsessive and ultimately lethal relationship with a younger man.
Her next film, Romance, was her response to charges the earlier movie was obscene. She hired an Italian porn star, Rocco Siffredi, as an actor in order to test the limits of obscenity. She originally conceived the movie as flat-out pornography before scaling back on the sex.
Romance, which was released here last year, clearly paved the way for Baise Moi. Featuring scenes of oral sex, masturbation and one fleeting scene of penetration, it all but obliterated the line between art and pornography. Strangely, though, the international hit was both more explicit and less disturbing than some of her earlier, earthier work.
Trimark Pictures, that movie's U.S. distributor, touted it as "the most sexually explicit mainstream film ever released." That may or may not have been true, but it certainly ranked among the most explicit, alongside In the Realm of the Senses, the 1976 Japanese film that Breillat cites as an influence. Its explicitness easily surpassed Last Tango in Paris, the 1973 movie that Breillat appeared in as an actress.
The difference between then and now is that Romance isn't an isolated event. And the distance between real sex and much of the simulated sex in Hollywood movies is no longer so great.
Also, in a world in which vocal feminists such as Annie Sprinkle and Camille Paglia speak admiringly of pornography and the free expression of female sexuality, the voices of anti-porn feminists who say that the material demeans women have been muted.
In her movie and in interviews, pornography actress Annabel Chong (a University of Southern California graduate student named Grace Quek) described the filming of her sexual marathon in 1995 in feminist terms. She wasn't an object, she said in the movie, as eager, naked men lined up to take turns with her.
The movie undermines her words - the then-22-year-old comes across as a sad and deeply troubled figure - but she insists that coupling with dozens of faceless partners was a way of testing her personal sexual boundaries and reversing gender roles.
There is a new frankness about sexuality and the human body that is everywhere apparent, even in movies that aren't about sex. The new Robert Altman film Dr. T and the Women features an actual childbirth - in close-up. It may be the first American movie ever to list "birth parents" in the end credits.
Altman says the scene - which could be viewed as a symbolic rebirth of the main character, a Dallas gynecologist played by Richard Gere - was integral to his vision.
The makers of Baise Moi also say their concerns were serious and artistic. Filmmakers Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, who both wrote and directed it, describe their work as a deliberately disturbing attack on hypocrisy and puritanism.
They've succeeded at being disturbing. The screening of their movie in Toronto sparked a number of walkouts, and in France an arch-conservative group forced the government to withdraw the movie from distribution. The culture ministry had initially allowed it to be released with a warning and a restriction that it could only be shown to people ages 16 and older. The film does not yet have an American distributor.
It features two French pornography actresses as women who long have been abused by men. After one is brutally raped, they go on a rampage of sex, robbery and murder, often unleashing their anger by shooting or beating the men they have sex with. The sex scenes, which are plentiful, were filmed in lingering and clinical close-up.
The work of two first-time filmmakers, one of whom is a pornography actress, the movie seems to cross the line into exploitation. One critic called it "a hard-core porn movie, with intellectual pretensions."
As for Breillat's work, for all the sexuality in her movies, her serious intent is always apparent, if only because of the endless philosophizing of her characters.
She says she deals with sex as part of her personal exploration of a force she considers so powerful and profound that it approaches the metaphysical.
Her first movie, the previously unreleased 25-year-old Une Vraie Jeune Fille (A Real Young Lady), was screened in Toronto last month and is seeking distribution worldwide. In it, a young teen-ager sodomizes herself with a bottle and has fantasies of herself with an older man in situations many would consider demeaning.
"Sex," Breillat said last year before the film's release, "is something transcendent. It's the way toward transfiguration." Through a translator, she spoke of breaking taboos as a way of achieving transcendence.
In every process of transfiguration and also in every taboo, there is something that scares us. ... Even the movement toward debasement - I consider it some sort of transcendence in reverse, toward the lower depths."
As for those who would protect society or the dignity of women by censoring art, she says she finds the notion that women are so fragile that they need protection more damaging.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
|