seven great sex scenes and one runner-up

RUNNER-UP: Viggo Mortensen and Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder





It's not a sex scene, per se: more a series of post-coital cuddles, but so intimately shot as to feel utterly convincing. This remake of Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder is, incidentally, a vastly underrated thriller, with great work from all three leads (Michael Douglas is the mad-as-hell husband), also and especially from David Suchet as the investigating detective. In fact, if you can watch it with the alternate ending intact, it qualifies as a great film. In the theatrical version, it still ranks among the very good.


NUMBER SEVEN: Ashley Judd and Viggo Mortensen in the Passion of Darkly Noon





This is a hard one to find. Philip Ridley is one of those cinematic enigmas. He made an underground (deep, deep underground) splash with the Reflecting Skin in 1990, a movie as strange and dark and compelling as you would imagine once you know it begins with an exploding toad. He followed it five years later with Passion, in which a young man (Brendan Fraser) raised in repressive religious surroundings escapes from a murderous mob and takes refuge with the free-spirited Judd and her mute boyfriend (Mortensen). It's no less strange than Skin (someone could probably write a thesis on that floating shoe) but has a fuller sense of depth and wholeness. Early on, the extraordinarily sensuous pairing of Judd and Mortensen enjoys an extraordinarily sensuous night of bliss which easily makes the list.


NUMBER SIX: Jude Law and Rachel Weisz in Enemy at the Gates







It's the worst part of the siege of Stalingrad. Law is a sniper who has become a hero of the Soviet struggle against the Nazis. Weisz is a Jewish intellectual who has thrown her lot in with the snipers. They sleep huddled in their uniforms along stone hallways in the rubble that was once a great city. Madly in love but with no opportunity for privacy, the two make love half-clad, almost silent, and surrounded by their comrades.


NUMBER FIVE: Clooney and Lopez in Out of Sight



It can't be an accident that two of these seven movies listed were edited by Anne V Coates. Her use of lightning-cuts to move smoothly back and forth in time gives the encounter a more engaging shape and allows us intimately into the heads of the characters. Again, this isn't the full-monty-last-tango-in-paris kind of sex scene, kind of wrapping up just when they get horizontal, but it's fantastically sexy. The movie itself, which was correctly lauded as a small masterpiece of action cinema (and probably led directly to those Soderbergh/Clooney Oceans yawners) is at heart a love story, and a marvellously well-realized one.


NUMBER FOUR: Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance in Intimacy



This is not just one sex scene but several, each communicating a different set of dynamics, often without spoken explanation. It's an electrifying accomplishment for two actors, requiring what must have been a near-total lack of vanity and some awesome, uberhuman discipline of concentration.


NUMBER THREE: Diana Glenn and Alex O'Loughlin in the Oyster Farmer





The scene on the dock. You'll know it. It's got great camera-work.


NUMBER TWO: Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello in a History of Violence



The one on the staircase, not the one in the bed.

Cronenberg gives us an interesting contrast here. The movie follows the journey of a happy, apparently well-adjusted family from denial of their own darkness into a forced exploration of their joint personal shadow. The first sex scene, performed in their daughter's bedroom with Bello dressed in her old cheerleaders' outfit, is saccharinely embarrassing. Only later, once the trickster darkness has invaded their home in the shape of the husband's past, do they find a truer expression of passion.


AND THE BEST SEX SCENE EVER:

Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez in Unfaithful





There's not a boring one in it, but the best is the first, in which Lane's character thinks back on her encounter with her lover as she rides home on the train. Largely due to her near-perfect performance (she ought to have had her Oscar; it was stolen from her by a beautiful woman wearing a fake nose), and largely to some of the most stunning editing I've ever seen (again, by Anne V Coates), watching this in the cinema felt more like actually having sex than watching a movie. Even on DVD, the immediacy of the flesh is so tangible as to be nearly unbearable. Aside from all that, the whole film is breathtaking, a real stunner from that problematical Eminence Terrible Adrian Lyne.

merry christmas, mr lawrence: sleeping with the enemy

This is no Christmas movie (its greatest flaw may be its title, along with its awkward freeze-frame ending). It is, rather, an extraordinary Japanese film from 1983 about British soldiers in a WWII Japanese POW camp. Written by director Nagisa Oshima but based on a novel by Laurens van der Post, it uses both Japanese and British actors and makes heavy use of both languages. Among other things, it is a study of two cultures at odds, and an examination of what defines the Perfect Warrior in each.

Oshima, a veteran of the mid-century Asian "New Wave", makes the bold decision to use not seasoned actors but renowned musicians in two of his three lead roles: David Bowie, who had by that time honed his chops both on film (most notably in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 the Man Who Fell to Earth) and Broadway (as the twisted John Merrick in the Elephant Man), is the charismatic prisoner Jack Celliers, and Japanese superstar Ryuichi Sakamoto is the haunted camp commandant, Captain Yonoi. Sakamoto takes on the difficult task of speaking the bulk of his lines in English: it seems he has learned them phonetically, and they find no easy egress. Each English word sounds painstakingly, even painfully, extracted, which might under different circumstances backfire, but in this case serves to lend a vulnerable boyishness as a sort of anguished backlighting to his beautiful, mask-like face.

I'd forgotten how unusual this movie is. I saw it for Bowie when I was a kid, but walked out of the theatre half in love with Tom Conti, who is bloody marvellous as the affable and canny Colonel Lawrence, a man who finds himself caught in the middle of no small drama due largely to his facility with the Japanese language but also to his considerable heart. Two scenes stand out as examples of breathtaking acting: in the first, he is condemned to die for the smuggling of a radio, a crime he did not commit and which nobody truly believes he committed. In the second, he tells an abortive story about a woman he knew in passing in Singapore, a story which he ends up not telling at all, but in a way as real as any moment I've ever seen onscreen. Conti made Reuben, Reuben the same year, for which he was Oscar-nominated, and that's too bad, because in retrospect I think this is both the better film and the more impressive performance. Except for a few forays onto the old Hollywood backlot (American Dreamer, the Quick and the Dead) he's mostly stayed across the pond to work in theatre and television (although I understand he's showing up in Julie Taymor's Tempest). And I do miss him.

Meanwhile, Sakamoto's magnificent score lends an otherworldly, ethereal air to the already surreal camp-life, an air which is accentuated in the editing-room by heavy use of slow fades to black and an unhurried pace. The camera-work is lovely and unobtrusive: one particular favorite is a slow zoom from the back of a very formal Japanese military courtroom towards Yonoi, one of its presiding officers, as he first lays eyes on the prisoner who will transform his life into something unrecognizable.

And there's another thing: the numinous sheen of Van der Post's wonderful thought process shines through the lovely space Oshima has opened up for it. The culmination of all these disparate, beautiful elements -- musical, philosophical, photographic, -- is in an important work of art. Like that classic novel you feel you should read, and put off, and when you delve in at last it winds up haunting you.

things i've been watching december 2010

Whiteout: (2009. dir: Dominic Sena) It was a good idea. The personnel on a base in Antarctica are about to clear out for the winter when a body is found, and suddenly there's a murderer to be caught in the small margin before the first bad storm hits. The script, alas, is for the most part halt and lame. It's not a complete waste of space because the acting is so good: Kate Beckinsale, Tom Skerritt, Alex O'Loughlin and Columbus Short pull it up by its bootstraps into a watchable piece, but you'll be half an hour ahead of these slow-poke characters in solving the various bends of the mystery, and the climactic fight scene, fought in a blinding snowstorm, is ridiculously unsatisfying to watch. It's a pretty movie, though, with Aurora Australis and miles of glacial wasteland, not to mention both Beckinsale and O'Loughlin stripping down to their skivvies in gratuitous displays of fleshly pulchritude. One of my favorite things about it is that there are flirtations and attractions, but the usually de rigeur love story fails to manifest, which means that Beckinsale's character is allowed to be a strong, gorgeous woman and still stand alone. Bravo for that.



the Pumpkin Eater: (1964. dir: Jack Clayton) The bad thing about a Harold Pinter script, especially in those early days, is the length of time two people, usually husband and wife, spend avoiding one another's questions. It makes me long for a Lillian Hellman play, in which everyone says exactly what they mean all the time, but with no less toxin, acid and vitriol. The GREAT thing, however, about the old Pinter scripts is that random character who will show up in a single scene with a single monologue and steal the show. There's a beauty in this one, a sly, brutal speech delivered in a beauty parlor to -- or, rather, AT -- Anne Bancroft while she's trapped beneath a hair-dryer. Pinter also likes to give us a boorish brute who repeats a single, strange speech over and over (see Christopher Walken in the Comfort of Strangers and his obsession with his father's moustache): in this, it's the unredoubtable James Mason, having a great deal of vicious fun playing a weak, cuckolded bully. One of the great shots of the era has to be the crooked, extreme close-up of his face, or, rather, one eye and his snarling mouth, as he pours the acrimonious venom into our heroine's ear that he hopes will destroy her marriage.

It's a slow film. We spend a lot of time following Bancroft as she walks around in a fog of depression, revisiting the decisions which have led into her current fugue state. The intelligence of her acting makes it worth the effort. It feels a little outdated: these days it's hard to imagine a liberal, upper-middle-class, bohemian woman who's bourne seven children to three husbands, and the abortion issue, which at the time must have been shocking, inevitably feels overly-dramatic in a time when a generation of adults have grown up knowing it's a legal option. In any case, there are always the eternal problems as well (adultery, for instance, and keeping the romance in a house full of kids). These are unreservedly addressed by Pinter, a man who doesn't flinch from the squalid side of domestic bliss, and the ending has a resonance of truth to it. Family is, first and foremost and even when it seems like nothing else, a grounding influence.


Iron Man 2: (2010. dir: Jon Favreau) The joy of the first Iron Man movie was in spending time with Robert Downey Jr, an actor of such massive talent that he can speak a line which is simultaneously hilariously funny and achingly poignant, make it sound completely improvised, and do that over and over for an entire film. There are exactly two compelling characters in this sequel: the hero (Downey) and the villain (Mickey Rourke's full-blown, bigger-than-life, Russkie-talking bad-ass who we really want to get to know better and don't get the chance). Every other character in it is nothing but clutter. Strip them away, along with the subplots, the girl issues, the superhero issues, the government issues, strip it all down to just these two fellows... THEN you're talking some big possibilities for a fine action film. (And leave in the robot assistants. Although the one from the last movie was funnier.)

It's a nice ensemble that Favreau has assembled, and with one notable exception the fault for the yawner characters doesn't lie with the actors. The exception, horrifyingly, is Sam Rockwell, who seems to have stumbled past his expiration date as far as being funny is concerned and, like a teen idol doing revival shows in his fifties, become a mockery of his previous, genuinely funny self. I first was troubled by it in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but because only Alan Rickman was consistently funny there, I figured it was a directorial problem and let it go. Now I'm worried. Rockwell still makes the grade with dramatic roles (see Moon, for God's sake, if you haven't already), but I was mortified at how badly acted AND painfully unfunny his Justin Hammer was.

If you decide to watch Iron Man 2 anyway, in all its forlorn dilapidation, make sure you stay through the credits, as there's a potentially exciting development which shows up late. Of course, that happened last time, too, and look what we got.