Explicit films looking for area audiences
by Robert Butler, Knight Ridder Newspapers

    Intimacy wastes little time in living up to its title.

   In the opening moments of the film, a man and a woman meet in his seedy London apartment, hurriedly disrobe and begin making love. While most of the lovemaking may be “simulated,” one shot captures the real thing.

   Intimacy is not a porn film. It stars two legitimate actors—Australian actress Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance, the artistic director of London’s restored Globe Playhouse—and it uses its explicitness for valid artistic ends.

   The film was awarded the Golden Bear for best film at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival; Fox was named best actress.

   The question posed by Intimacy is one being raised in world cinema: Does explicit sex have a place in the non-pornographic cinema?

   The movie, about an anonymous affair that goes bad when the obsessed man insists on spying on his lover outside their relationship, is clearly concerned with real issues: betrayal, commitment and the idea that physical intimacy often is used to avoid emotional intimacy.

   Intimacy is only the latest instance in which explicit sexuality can be found in a film that otherwise couldn’t be called pornographic. Not surprisingly, these movies originate outside the United States; the Europeans are less nervous about wading into such troubled waters.

   “Pornography? I don’t know what it is,” Intimacy director Patrice Chereau said by phone from his Paris home. “I never watch porn films. I get bored immediately.”

   Chereau said one of the inspirations for Intimacy was the cinema of Ingmar Bergman, which often ruthlessly dissects relationships between men and women.

   “In films, you need to show people behaving as they do in real life. We wanted the audience to identify with the people up there on screen. We decided very early to show everything, to show the sex scenes from beginning to end,” he said.

   Although there is virtually no dialogue exchanged between the two lovers, Chereau and his actors decided to rehearse their physical movements as carefully as they would their lines.

   “Everything was written and then rehearsed,” the director said. “Then it was rehearsed in front of the camera before shooting. The actors knew exactly the meaning of each scene and what their every movement suggested.”

   Jeanine Basinger, a professor of film at Wesleyan University who specializes in movies by, for and about women, thinks that explicit sexuality rarely stands up to her litmus test.

   “If you’re going to use sex in this way, it’s got to have a real narrative purpose that achieves an emotional response or an understanding of the character that you can’t get any other way,” she said. “And you’re talking an extremely small margin of scripts that need that sort of treatment.”

   Only a few recent films have taken the plunge into sexual explicitness, and none has been a big box-office hit. Mostly, they’ve been limited to bookings in independent theaters. But some critics think the trend toward graphic sexuality will collapse because explicitness makes little sense artistically.