Real Sex in the Movies
When What You See Is Not An Act
Sometimes the flesh-to-flesh contact onscreen looks so real, you might wonder if the actors are really doing it. No one can ever be absolutely certain whether they are (or aren’t) except for the participants themselves, of course. But sometimes we have more than an inkling. Here are several examples through the years.
Viewers watching the hit romance An Officer and a Gentleman back in 1982 might have felt there was a certain authenticity to the lovemaking between Richard Gere and Debra Winger. And indeed, rumors circulated about actual sex happening during filming. They were never confirmed, and Winger, to the contrary, often complained about the animosity on set between her and her costar and director, Taylor Hackford. You be the judge:
There was a precedent for such did-they-or-didn’t-they speculation—Nicolas Roeg’s sizzling hot horror movie Don’t Look Now in 1973. Rumors that the sex scene between the onscreen husband and wife played by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland was authentic spread even before the movie was released. Roeg denied it, but in recent interviews, Christie—though she could be joshing—acknowledged that the rumors were true. In any case, the scene’s erotic charge is extraordinary, and it’s beautifully filmed:
The ’70s were a wild time sexually—it was the era of “porno chic”—and it’s only natural that the movies would reflect that freedom. Even so, it was still shocking when Penthouse mogul Bob Guccione reputedly added real sex scenes to an orgy depicted in Caligula (1979), an epic spectacular of ancient Roman debauchery. And when Melvin Van Peebles allegedly had sex onscreen with real prostitutes in the black-power fable Sweet Sweetback’s Badassssss Song (1971), it just added to the movie’s street cred. Perhaps the most familiar example to art-house audiences at the time was Nagisa Oshima’s period Japanese romance In the Realm of the Senses (1976): it’s two leads are visibly having intercourse in at least two scenes.
In most people’s eyes, the proof of honest-to-God sex was an erect penis and penetration, so it’s not surprising that films catering to the gay male audience were pioneers. Jean Genet included some unsimulated male-to-male fondling in his avant-garde 1950 short film Un Chant d’amour (“Song of Love”). In John Waters’s trailblazing no-budget indie Pink Flamingos (1972), the drag queen Divine gives the actor playing her son a very demonstrative blow-job. The ultra-liberated German gay film Taxi Zum Klo (1980) contained a scene that openly showed anal sex between two men and ejaculation. And John Cameron Mitchell’s light-heartedly unsimulated Shortbus (2006)—which has sex of all stripes: hetero, lesbian and gay—features an all-male threesome in which one guy memorably hums “The Star-Spangled Banner” while rimming another.
Two recent gay and lesbian films from France add real sex to heighten the drama, and the effect is tantalizing. Stranger by the Lake (2014) is a Hitchcockian thriller that shows gay men cruising at an isolated lakeside, hooking up, and killing one another; though the sex acts are real, body doubles are subbed in during close-ups. The ineffably romantic lesbian drama, Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), amps up the emotional intensity of its three-hour length by shooting entire scenes in close-up, including the sex. The filmmaker and actresses claim that prosthetic genitalia covered the real thing, but what’s onscreen looks anything but simulated.
Two notorious instances of real oral sex in art films ended up being more of a distraction than an enhancement to the films in which they were included. In the sexually subversive Devil in the Flesh (1986), the Dutch actress Maruschka Detmers very publicly (in court) fellates her young paramour, and movie audiences and critics couldn’t seem to talk about anything else. Likewise, in Vincent Gallo’s moody indie The Brown Bunny (2003), Chloë Sevigny—Gallo’s real-life girlfriend at the time—swallows his erect penis onscreen and that became the movie’s claim to fame. Here are the moments leading up to it:
In art films, it’s all about the filmmaker. Catherine Breillat, a French director with an intellectual bent, had an eye for Rocco Siffredi, an amply endowed Italian adult-film actor. In two of her films, Romance (1999) and Anatomy of Hell (2003), Siffredi appears impressively hard in sex scenes. Other than Siffredi’s performance, Breillat says, the sex in her films is simulated or body doubles are employed. In a similar vein, Danish provocateur Lars Von Trier obsesses on female sexuality—both ecstatic and masochistic—in his two-part marathon Nymphomania (2013), which stars, among others, Shia LaBeouf and Charlotte Gainsbourg. And when the sex gets graphic, Von Trier resorts to body doubles and prosthetic penises. Whatever the intended effect, the explicitness of these movies comes off as more of a political statement than a turn-on.
Sometimes real sex can actually make storytelling more sensuous and tactile. The 2015 film Love is a case in point. Its director, the always-provocative Gaspar Noé, usually deals with extreme violence and sexual depravity, but this time out he plays nice. The male lead, Karl Glusman, performs a few scenes visibly hard and even ejaculates, and the scenes he shares with two very beautiful women have genuine heat. Less hot but unusually intimate, the British relationship movie 9 Songs (2004) unfolds like an improvisational exercise. Young and attractive actors Kieren O’Brien and Margo Stilley make love in their flat—and it’s clear that they really do it—then go out to a rock concert, over and over again. Since it’s shot like a documentary, in such a way that the “acting” and the camera are invisible, we get incredibly close without really knowing the characters well. It’s all intuitive.
The addition of real sex can shatter the illusion a movie is trying to create: it can force you to think about the actors as actors, and not the characters they are playing. But for a talent like Mark Rylance—a trained British theater actor, currently in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies and on TV in Wolf Hall—that’s not a problem. In the remarkable movie Intimacy (2001), he plays a man having an affair with a married woman (Kerry Fox) he barely knows. She enjoys the feral sex they share, and the oral sex we actually see her perform and the real erection he displays only underline the nature of their connection. It transforms Rylance’s character, and the movie, directed by Patrice Chéreau, will leave a powerful imprint on anyone who sees it.
