Critic’s Notebook: Let’s Talk About Sex, Just Don’t Show It

David Rooney
·8 min read
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When the companies behind Ira Sachs’ new drama about the shifting currents of intimacy in a troubled love triangle submitted Passages to the Motion Picture Association ratings board, they probably anticipated an R.

But the MPA came back with an NC-17 rating, forcing the distributor to release the film (which premiered at Sundance earlier this year) unrated rather than risk commercial marginalization or impose cuts that would diminish its intensity. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Sachs painted the MPA as an outmoded relic of the 1950s, detecting a strong whiff of dangerous cultural censorship and possible homophobia behind the seldom issued NC-17.

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Let’s be clear: Passages — which Mubi opened Aug. 4 in Los Angeles and New York before expanding to other cities in the weeks to come — is a movie with a generous amount of sex, both gay and straight. But it’s neither particularly explicit nor remotely gratuitous, even if it’s frequently quite hot.

The sex is, above all, integral to the movie’s emotional texture, to the way the characters navigate their volatile relationships, the way they express their feelings and explore their connections through their bodies as they come together and pull apart. In other words, the film’s candor in depicting sex and nudity nudges it closer to European cinema than American.

The ratings controversy around Sachs’ movie comes just as Oppenheimer has been generating talk on social media and in the press about being the first Christopher Nolan movie to feature sex scenes. The trysts between Cillian Murphy as scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh as his lover both before and during the former’s marriage earned the release an R rating, which is standard given the glimpses of sweaty flesh on view.

But the fact that people are talking about it at all — and no one has been talking about it louder than Nolan himself — just underlines how squeamish American movies are about sex and sensuality.

The sex scenes in both those movies serve a clear narrative purpose. In Nolan’s film, they convey the magnetism of Oppenheimer and its ultimately devastating effect on a woman who, while not really on screen long enough to acquire much complexity, is defined by her intellectual curiosity, political radicalism and carnal desire.

The actual intercourse — once during the relationship and once years later, as a haunting specter conjured in a security hearing — is brief and somewhat mechanical, while a long postcoital discussion has Murphy and Pugh sitting naked in armchairs on opposite sides of a room, carefully positioned and framed to keep crotches out of sight. The scene looks like an interview for an admin job at a nudist colony. It’s anything but erotic.

The scene in the Paris-set Passages that evidently had the MPA clutching their pearls, by contrast, is erotically and emotionally charged, raunchy and tender. It takes place after narcissistic German filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) has strayed outside his marriage to English printmaker Martin (Ben Whishaw) with Agathe (Adèle Exarchapoulos), a French schoolteacher he met at the wrap party for his latest feature.

Back in bed with Martin again, Tomas more or less offers himself up, resulting in sex that could be a bid for forgiveness, a reconciliation, a sad acknowledgment of enduring feelings or a manipulative attempt by Tomas to keep a hold on his husband while continuing to explore a new relationship. Or it could be all those things.

Like the movie’s other sex scenes, it’s dramatically loaded, and although it’s shot in a single take with no artful draping of the sheets, it’s hardly graphic. Perhaps the most explicit aspect of the scene is the sight of Tomas’ hands snaking around Martin’s torso for an intimate caress or two. To put it bluntly, he goes for the butt crack.

Was it the fact that the scene in question depicts queer sexuality that made the ratings board respond like extra-fretful helicopter parents? A quick survey of sexually frank LGBTQ movies since 2000 shows that most have gone out unrated, possibly to avoid the NC-17 stigma, among them Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country, Andrew Haigh’s Weekend and Sachs’ 2012 feature, Keep the Lights On. None of those films is in any way salacious. (Films that did accept their NC-17 classification, both queer-themed and not, include Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color, a Cannes Palme d’Or winner that also starred Exarchapoulos; Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education; Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution; Steve McQueen’s Shame; and Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe biopic, Blonde, which had a minimal theatrical run before its Netflix debut.)

The prim attitude toward sex in American movies goes beyond MPA rulings to Hollywood itself. Sex and unapologetic sensuality have been all but banished from the mainstream since the heyday of erotic thrillers in the 1980s and early ‘90s — films like Dressed to Kill, American Gigolo, Body Heat, Basic Instinct, 9½ Weeks, The Last Seduction, Color of Night and Sliver. People onscreen were getting laid and loving it back then.

Even releases from that era that went relatively light on skin felt torrid and unabashed compared to current studio output — think the smoking hot chemistry between Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham, or Dennis Quaid’s attentions causing Ellen Barkin to practically shimmy up the bedpost in The Big Easy.

What happened to make American movies so desexualized? As the holdover artistic spirit of the emancipated ’70s faded further into the distance, studios became increasingly corporate and less creative in their thinking. In order to be profitable, movies had to play not only across the U.S. — including conservative Red states and Bible Belt regions — but internationally, where many countries have rigidly imposed codes concerning sex and nudity.

The ascendance of the superhero movie has been another nail in the coffin of sensuality. In the Superman films of the late ’70s and early ’80s, there was most definitely something cooking between Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder. But in the more recent wave of comic book-inspired action fare, the protagonists are so sexless they might as well be genital-free Kens and Barbies.

American movies still talk about sex, often in the most puerile and prurient ways in faux-titillating raunch comedies like the recent No Hard Feelings. But they rarely depict it unselfconsciously. Of course, there are exceptions, like the gonzo coitus at the climax of Beau Is Afraid or the wacky three-way in Joy Ride. But the fact that everyone now makes such a big deal of those moments is an indication of how rare they’ve become.

After Adrian Lyne’s return to directing following a 20-year hiatus — the flaccid Deep Water — failed to generate the promised sparks, much was made at Sundance earlier this year of the sexual heat in talented newcomer Chloe Domont’s throwback to the ’90s erotic thriller, Fair Play, which sold to Netflix for a cool $20 million. But I found the movie sleazy enough to be fun — and clever in its overturning of antiquated gender dynamics — though not quite trashy, or sultry, enough to rank with its progenitors. It also felt a bit calculated in its raciness.

The utterly natural depiction of sex that we see in French cinema like Other People’s Children, Elle, Sauvage or Stranger by the Lake — as, respectively, a vital part of the language of relationships, a violation, a transactional currency or even an element of danger and intrigue — seems inconceivable in American movies anywhere beyond the indie fringes.

Where, in film, is the supposed sex-positive movement that has become part of the cultural conversation? Cable and streaming platforms have stepped into the breach with shows that don’t hold back on steamy content — think Girls, Insecure, P-Valley, Bridgerton, Game of Thrones, Euphoria and The White Lotus.

So is the dearth of grownup attitudes toward sex and sensuality on big screens a stagnant situation or a step backwards? Many would argue convincingly that it’s been that way since the late ’90s. But it’s also conceivable that we’re in a unique perfect-storm moment, where far-right conservatism has converged with post-#MeToo liberal timidity. On social media, some Gen Z filmgoers have even questioned whether sex scenes have a place in movies. Seriously, kids, you need to get out more.

The presence of intimacy coordinators on set has no doubt helped to ensure an environment of increased safety and trust for actors, establishing essential boundaries of body autonomy. But unlike so many uninhibited European screen stars, the majority of major-name American performers remain shy about stripping down and going at it.

Witness Penn Badgley declaring his dislike of filming intimate scenes and his insistence on less sex and skin for his character in season 4 of Netflix’s You out of respect for his marriage. “That aspect of Hollywood has always been very disturbing to me,” said the actor in a Variety interview. But many of us who bemoan the shortage of full-blooded sensuality at the multiplex might wonder which Hollywood he’s talking about.

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