A Time for Candor in the Grass

On a recent afternoon during the New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall--the sort of place where plaques commemorating generous benefactors are affixed to the best seats and there is a general aura of classiness and culture--a full house of journalists, industry types and film critics watched a pair of actors engage in oral sex. Some of them, the critics anyway, may even have been taking notes.

The reason this film--Patrice Chereau’s “Intimacy”--was being seen by these people at this venue had very little to do with sex. Well, that’s not true. There was probably some prurient interest, but if there was, it was quickly quashed. Instead, “Intimacy” offered a bleak but honest look at sexual relations--in this case a loveless transaction conducted in a crummy flat between two not overly attractive strangers, without the benefit of soft lighting, cutaways or strategically placed sheets, often in what seemed like excruciatingly real time (35 minutes of the film’s 115-minute running time reportedly pass in this fashion).

What’s interesting is not that this film was in the festival, but that there were two others on the bill featuring a similar level of sexual and emotional candor: Alfonso Cuaron’s “Y Tu Mama Tambien” (And Your Mother Too) and Catherine Breillat’s “Fat Girl.” If at first glance this seems like some sort of movement, it’s not. Chereau and Breillat are French; Cuaron is a Mexican who lives in New York. Their films were shot in English, French and Spanish, respectively, and their subjects are 30ish adults, teenage girls and teenage boys, respectively.

In a way, though, watching these films is like being introduced to a new country. Of course, the terrain is not geographical or cultural. And although it’s open to everyone, few filmmakers dare to go there.

“This anxiety [about sex] is one of the foundations of the Western world and the Muslim world as well,” says Breillat, who has confronted (full frontally) this foundation before in such films as “Romance.” “There may be differences of intensity but not of kind. I can’t comprehend how intimacy, private relations, can be the object of moral laws when they concern the people involved. There’s also the paradoxical element that sex is the object of most laws, most taboos, most of our fears, and yet it’s also an act that we engage in all the time, and it’s the simplest act in the world.” This anxiety is keenly felt in America and therefore in its movies.

Cuaron says that even Mexico, which, because of the influence of the Catholic church, might at first blush seem nervous about sexual matters, is less so than the U.S. (He contends that Mexico is closer culturally to Europe than it is to the United States.) Chereau believes that France and Europe in general have a tradition of confronting sexual topics, but he’s not too sure they have much of a tradition of actually illustrating them. When he was shooting “Intimacy” in London, he was thinking particularly of Ingmar Bergman’s films, which he says are permeated with sex, although again not graphically depicted.

“In France, there is theater that deals with lovers’ quarrels and also the farcical aspects of that,” Breillat says. “An example in cinema is [Eric] Rohmer’s films that depict teenagers coming of age, their relations, their experiences with love, and that is an attitude, a perspective on love, that is completely different from Hollywood and is far more accurate, far truer.”

Breillat’s film is in part about the perils of coming of age, from the point of view of a pair of teenage sisters, Anas (Anas Reboux), who is, well, overweight, and Elena (Roxane Mesquida), slightly older, who is beautiful. Much of the film is devoted to the tensions and bonds between the two. These are brought to a head when Elena picks up a college student and brings him back to the room they share. Elena has never had sex before, and there is a protracted scene, with Anas listening to every word, in which she negotiates away her virginity. It’s a complicated business.

“She doesn’t wish to admit this desire on her part because she’s been brought up to believe that desire is somehow guilty, so she has to lead him, he must be somehow guilty of this desire,” Breillat says. “She gives up her virginity where she demands in exchange from the boyfriend this sentimental discourse, these promises. She wants to believe in his declarations of eternal love even if she knows it’s not true. People lie not only to other people, they lie to themselves.”

Generally, teenage girls are not allowed this kind sexual/psychological complication, either on-screen or in real life. Because they are adolescents and unfamiliar with what they are feeling, they are supposedly incapable of strategizing the way adults do. They are just “confused.”

Male teenage sexuality is treated differently but no less dishonestly. Whereas teenage girls are dismissed as promiscuous or are punished for their sexuality, boys are indulged or laughed at. “Y Tu Mama Tambien” traffics in and subverts both of these ideas, and it has gotten Cuaron into trouble in Mexico. The film has been banned for anyone under 18, and Cuaron has gone to court to wrest the board of censors away from government control.

Although Cuaron has taken heat for his depiction of a corrupt, trashy Mexico and his protagonists’ dope smoking, what really drove the censors wild was the sex. The boys, Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal), maul their girlfriends and the married woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdu), who goes with them on a road trip. Tenoch and Julio are appallingly, and all too believably, clumsy.

As in “Intimacy” and “Fat Girl,” their sex scenes are played out in real time, which in this case is about five seconds, much to Luisa’s chagrin. This is not played strictly for laughs, however.

“Hollywood teen comedies tend to ridicule the characters,” Cuaron says. “I find that very moralistic and hypocritical. They make fun at the expense of the characters, as opposed to observing. If you observe teenagers, you’ll find that you can have a lot of fun because they can be very funny. But then what all these other movies fail to follow it with, yeah, there’s a lot of funny stuff going on, but there’s an angst and a very sad side of it.”

In “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” sex is part of the characters’ search for identity. In “Fat Girl,” it comments on the sisters’ relationship. In “Intimacy,” it’s a form of expression for two people who can’t communicate in any other way.

To Chereau, Hollywood sex usually stops the story cold. It may illustrate how the characters feel about each other, but it does so in a generic, perfunctory way. It’s seldom awkward, except at the beginning. The bodies conform to contemporary ideas of perfection, rarely seen in real life. In fact, Chereau breaks a cinematic taboo by showing less-than-perfect specimens on-screen--in this case Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox, who are over 30! Such activity among “older people” is usually a cause for polite embarrassment, like imagining one’s parents in bed.

“The [usual] sex scene is a lesson in aerobics,” Cuaron says. “When I see big stars [having sex] in a Hollywood movie, I’m like, ‘Wow. It’s like seeing StairMaster lessons.”’

Big stars are something you won’t see in compromising positions, at least not here. American actors are precluded from this sort of work in the same way that they were once precluded from portraying gay characters. It might stigmatize them, undermine their careers. For Breillat, this is a moot point. She says that stars take the viewer out of a sex scene--why, that’s Julia Roberts and Kevin Spacey!--so the European tradition of using nonactors lends itself to shooting these kinds of movies. (She found Reboux at a McDonald’s.)

In fact, although these three films feature professionals, most of the actors are not household names. “Intimacy’s” Rylance is perhaps best known here as the entomologist in “Angels and Insects” (1995), hardly a blockbuster.

Fox is a cult favorite by virtue of Danny Boyle’s “Shallow Grave” (1994) “Y Tu Mama Tambien’s” Luna and Garcia Bernal are up-and-comers. However, Verdu is a figure in Europe, having appeared in “Belle Epoque” (1992). Cuaron says that it’s acceptable for leading European actors and actresses to appear in sexually provocative material, citing Spanish actress Victoria Abril (1990’s “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down”). Again, the culture there permits it.

Perhaps, though, there is and always has been a vast, unrecognized international audience for these films. Consider that in all three of these movies the women are more aware of what’s really going on in bed (even if they don’t admit it to themselves) than the men are. The guys would rather keep it simple and unexamined, and can’t cope when things don’t work out that way.

“I think the best audience for my movie [is] women,” Chereau says. “Women know better how to manage desperation, the usual, normal desperation. Women are not so fragile. They are stronger. We see it every day.”