A New Sexual Revolution on Screen?

When French filmmaker Catherine Breillet cast an Italian pornography star in her newest movie, “Romance,” some members of her cast were taken aback. A wall had been breached. The line separating pornography and art was being blurred. Filmgoers who have seen David Cronenberg’s “Crash” in 1997 or some of the more sexually daring movies from Europe may ask if that line even exists anymore. If it does, then “Romance” was intentionally crafted to obliterate it.

The movie sprang out of an impulse of defiance. Feminists criticized Breillet’s disturbing last movie, “Parfait Amour!” (Perfect Love!), for going too far in its portrayal of a woman’s obsessive and, ultimately, violent relationship with a younger man. To defy them--but mostly to challenge the reticence and fear inside herself, she says--Breillet decided that next time out she would test the limits of “too far.”

“The path taken by me with this movie was to confront the notion of obscenity because I am afraid of it,” she says, speaking through an interpreter on a recent visit to Los Angeles. “My idea was that by confronting it I would stop being afraid of it. It stops being powerful. It is something that you’ve gone through and it no longer exists.”

As originally written, “Romance” was flat-out pornography. Along the way, Breillet pulled back on the sex. And with the main character’s incessant philosophizing heard in voice-over during even the most explicit scenes--almost as if she were solemnly reading from her journal--there is never any doubt that the movie before us is meant to stimulate thought, even arguments, as well as hormones.

Even toned down, though, “Romance” is scandalous enough that newspapers in Seattle refused to run ads for it, and until recently distributors weren’t certain that it would be shown at all in Orange County. It is opening Friday at the AMC MainPlace theaters in Santa Ana after the Edwards Theater chain refused to run it, said Dennis O’Connor, vice president of Trimark Pictures’ theatrical division. The movie grossed $17,000 its first weekend in Los Angeles at the Nuart Theater and has shown in New York since Sept. 17, where the $41,000 it grossed during its first week was the second-highest ever at the Quad, O’Connor said.

“It’s certainly grossing exactly as we had hoped,” he said. “We haven’t had very many walkouts. They all seem to be very informed viewers.”

“Romance” is expanding throughout Southern California next Friday and will open across the country in coming weeks.

Containing scenes of masturbation and several shots of the star, Caroline Ducey, performing oral sex, the movie, which carries no Motion Picture Assn. of America rating, has at least one fleeting glimpse of vaginal penetration. This occurs during a fantasy orgy sequence in which women are divided in half; below they’re being serviced by anonymous studs while their top halves enjoy the ministrations of caring, supportive males. The scene is as bizarre and outrageous as the satanic orgy in “Eyes Wide Shut” was meant to be but wasn’t.

While “Romance” may or may not be “the most sexually explicit mainstream film ever released,” as distributor Trimark Pictures claims, it certainly ranks among them, alongside “In the Realm of the Senses,” the Japanese film made in 1976 by Nagisa Oshima that Breillet acknowledges as a strong influence. And it leaves Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris,” in which Breillet appeared in 1973, far back in the dust.

Coming in the same year as the uproar over the MPAA’s objections to simulated sex in “Eyes,” and an emerging mainstream interest in pornography, as evidenced by “Boogie Nights” and the exploding sales of so-called adult videos and Internet sites, it would appear that “Romance” hits these shores straddling a full-blown zeitgeist.

Sex, of course, has always been hot, but we seem to be witnessing the falling away of taboos about how it is presented and where and about who consumes it. And this is happening at the same time that social scientists note a slackening of the sexual caution inspired in the 1980s by the AIDS epidemic--at the same time, in other words, that young people are exploring their sexual freedoms with unchecked exuberance.

This very subject, or something close to it, is at the heart of Michael Cristofer’s upcoming movie “Body Shots,” which had its own troubles with the ratings board over explicitness.

Other signs that explicit sex has conquered the mainstream are plentiful. Nudity and sex-related shows are commonplace on cable TV, and the unusual number of sex-themed movies at film festivals this year drew particular notice from a number of critics. On magazine stands, publications such as Richardson and Nerve, which boasts that it prints “literary smut,” package pornography for the stylish set. And in mainstream Hollywood movies, portrayals of sex have reached the point where serious actors in serious films no longer must decide simply whether they’ll go nude--now the question is whether they’ll bury their faces in someone’s crotch, and, if so, then for how long and with the camera at which angle.

What is going on here may be summed up in the title of a recent book by historian Rochelle Gurstein: “The Repeal of Reticence.” In it she decries the continual rising of the threshold of what is considered appropriate for public consumption. “One of the defining qualities of sophisticated modern people is that nothing shocks them,” she told a magazine reporter last year. “The consequence of not having a sense of shame, and believing that nothing is sacred, is a world that looks like ours.”

Breillet, who views sex as a metaphysical experience, might argue that her movies are about what is sacred. “Sex,” she says, “is something transcendent. It’s the way toward transfiguration. 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.”

One thing that distinguishes her work and some of the other new movies from most of their cinematic precursors is that they view sex through the gaze of a woman. The view can be discomfiting.

A documentary shown at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (“Sex: The Annabel Chong Story”) chronicled a porn star’s sexual marathon in which she had sex 251 times (with about 100 men) during a 10-hour period. The film was directed by a man, but the actress, Annabel Chong (in real life a then-22-year-old USC graduate student named Grace Quek), speaks of the stunt in feminist terms, saying that it was all about exploring her personal sexual boundaries and reversing gender roles.

Another documentary, this one shown at Slamdance (“The Girl Next Door”), chronicles the birth of a porn star as it documents two years in the life a former Oklahoma housewife who flees an abusive husband and turns herself into the medically enhanced sex queen called Stacy Valentine. The movie is directed by a woman, Christine Fugate.

Despite these filmmakers’ insistence on presenting sex as they say it has not been shown on film before, Cristofer says he sees evidence that U.S. society isn’t yet ready to acknowledge truthful depictions of sexuality, especially where it concerns women.

The MPAA rating board wanted to give “Body Shots” an NC-17 rating, he says, and it was mostly because of the words and actions of the female characters. After almost two months of wrangling and cutting, the movie will be released by New Line on Oct. 22 with an R rating.

“It was very instructive because their objections reflect our culture,” says director Cristofer, who also is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “The Shadow Box.” “Their objections were very sexist and were based almost completely on ignorance and fear. The men in the picture were allowed to say and do just about everything that was in the original script. The women were not. The women were not supposed to know the things they knew, the sexual techniques, and not supposed to express enjoyment of sexual activity.”

His movie follows eight young adults on a night of club hopping as they blindly follow their hormones into some dangerous places. The movie, which eventually focuses on an alleged rape, incorporates research Cristofer had accumulated for an unfinished project on sexual attitudes in America. When he began conducting interviews and collecting published material, he assumed that there was a “cap” on sexuality as a result of the AIDS epidemic. “What we discovered was that the lid seems to have been blown off,” he says.

“The behavior is pretty much like the behavior I remember pre-AIDS,” he says. “I don’t know why that is. I think some of it just has to do with a little bit of time passing and a lot of these kids not having lived through the scare. Then I guess there is a whole millennium theory going on about that.” Movies and television are pushing the boundaries of what can be shown, he says, partly in reflection of these changing attitudes.

But while more sex has found its way on screen, he says the society still is much more comfortable with frivolous depictions.

Breillet, too, is critical of official and self-appointed censors, particularly those who say they want to protect the dignity of women. More damaging to women’s dignity, she says, is the attitude that they are so fragile that they need protection.

An instinctual filmmaker, Breillet says her movies evolve as she is making them, as she keeps pushing herself toward what frightens her the most.

Men and women in her movies don’t seem to like each other very much. The paradox they face is that sex, the transcendent act, is necessarily filled with anguish because, in her view, the desire men have for women vanishes when they reach orgasm. Women, she says, are different.

“Sexual pleasure in women is very transcendent,” she says. “Man presents himself as being strong and the woman the weaker,” she says. “During intercourse what happens is that the woman progressively becomes stronger. . . . If you look at it this way, it’s very beautiful.

“The strong becomes weak and weak becomes strong. This is what we call the exchange of love, and this is something that I find magnificent, but I understand that it scares men.”

Sex, then, would seem to be a metaphor in her movies for male-female relationships. But she says no to this.

“The sexual act itself is its own metaphor.”