Graphic and intimate, yes. But is it hot?

“Ilove you, I really . . . love you,” the wan Brett Ratner look-alike unconvincingly testifies to his beautiful fiancee in the second episode of HBO’s “Tell Me You Love Me.” The couple progresses to some explicit sex that looks as if it might soon get pretty hot . . . until the woman breaks the mood mid-motion by demanding he admit he was flirting with a waitress earlier in the evening. In another episode, a manipulative woman desperate to get pregnant herds her reluctant husband into bed, saying: “I’m surging . . . . I’m estrogenic.” Now that’s some hot, sexy talk.

In Oscar-winning director Ang Lee’s very NC-17 “Lust, Caution,” the initial coupling of the film’s stars -- in all its explicitness -- is so cruel as to make it hard to watch. And last year’s “Shortbus,” the follow-up to writer-director John Cameron Mitchell’s subversive “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” is probably the only American movie by a respected filmmaker to show several instances of actual unsimulated sex. Much of which was followed by tears and depression.

Remember when sex used to be fun? But so it goes now in the modern-media world of graphic intimacy, where it seems each year the needle of permissiveness moves further north (or south, depending on your point of view) but the fun-ometer barely registers a tick.

It wasn’t long ago that movies like “American Pie” and “Wedding Crashers” put the lie to the description of sex as the most fun you could have without smiling. But shows such as “Tell Me You Love Me” and explicit-to-the-point-of-hard-core films such as “Shortbus” (2006) and “Intimacy” (2001) take this nonsmiling approach deadly seriously in the name of realism and uncovering a truth.

“Being erotic was certainly never a consideration,” says “Tell Me You Love Me” creator Cynthia Mort. “In all those scenes, the primary motivation was to tell the story and advance the characters and reveal something about them. They’re not in a place to turn the lights down low and put on some music, light some candles . . . . That’s not who they are right now. I think there are some very intense moments between these couples. They may not be erotic, but they’re certainly compelling.”

A changing role

The days of the mad-flounder pool flopping in “Showgirls” and the meticulously lighted but almost grim eroticism of “Unfaithful” seem far away. So, is this some sort of ironic side effect of conservative moral crusades (the ultimate triumph: Show it and no one will want it!) or the dizzying queasiness of liberal sexual revolutions?

“Maybe the role of sex in our lives is changing,” Mort says. “There’s really no need for it. And when you lose the need, the truth comes out. Sex is fun, and it will be fun on our show. I had a very specific aesthetic and story to tell those first 10 episodes.”

John Waters, director of a number of explicit films and self-proclaimed purveyor of bad taste, doesn’t see anything wrong with explicit sex in dramas -- although he’s got a taste for seeing it played for laughs too.

“It’s been going on for a while,” Waters says. “It always starts in Europe; they do everything first. I did it in ‘Pink Flamingos’: Divine performed real fellatio while she delivered two pages of dialogue. So it’s old hat to me. ‘Pink Flamingos’ was revolutionary because it was a comedy. Most of the unsimulated sex has been in dramas. No one thinks their own sex life is funny. Sex in my movies is ludicrous; it’s surreal. But I make comedies.”

Catherine Breillat’s “Sex Is Comedy” (2002) and “Romance” (1999) are among the prominent French films to depict unsimulated sex without a whiff of eroticism. Patrice Chereau’s “Intimacy” (2001) is a latter-day “Last Tango in Paris” but without the fascinating psychological tightrope act and Marlon Brando’s insouciance -- just the robotically anonymous coupling. Now, even U.S. senators are taking the joy out of anonymous sex. And the 2005 documentary “Inside Deep Throat,” which recently aired on HBO complete with the titular act clearly depicted, was derailed by its own portent.

Oh, for ‘Caligula’

Meanwhile, the joyless group-groping in “Shortbus” makes one long for the good old days -- of ancient Rome. “Caligula” (1979), with its dressed-up trash (hard-core sex scenes here, dramatic moments with Peter O’Toole and Malcolm McDowell there), at least made orgies seem like things people might enjoy. HBO’s sadly defunct “Rome” also had a freewheeling -- and diverse -- set of attitudes about coitus.

Enjoyment, eroticism or the lack thereof aside, the real connection among these recent films and TV shows is that their graphic sexuality is integral; the lack of clothing is part of their fabric.

The explicit depictions are akin to new paints on the artists’ palettes, perhaps allowing them to express something in an unprecedented fashion.

Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, says: “I wouldn’t call ‘Tell Me You Love Me’ the new masterpiece or that it somehow shows how truly beautifully artistically this kind of material can be incorporated -- but it’s moving in that direction. You don’t get the sense of, ‘Here comes the love scene . . . now.’ If you took out the sex scenes, you’d actually be missing something besides just the sex.”

Mort agrees.

“I think if you cut away during those intimate, kind of raw, exposing moments, you don’t get to reveal another layer of who we are,” she says. “Sex is part of the language of intimacy. It would be the same if I cut out in the middle of an emotional speech by one of my characters. You wouldn’t have the whole experience.”

As “Lust, Caution” co-writer James Schamus has said, “The character finds the truth of her life, going to places she didn’t know existed until she gets there.”

Different mores

Standards do seem to be shifting, based purely on the volume of explicit output in film and TV. The most respected films to receive the old X rating, “Last Tango in Paris” (1973) and the Oscar-winning “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), seem more in line with R and PG-13 ratings today. After all, the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s ratings board considers the pervasive, psychopathic violence of “Wolf Creek” or the “Saw” series more fit for public consumption than the occasional glimpse of bohemian sexuality in “Henry & June” or “When Night Is Falling.”

And those latter films don’t approach the explicitness of Lee’s “Lust, Caution,” in which a novice Mata Hari undergoes a personal sexual revolution as she seduces a collaborator during the World War II Japanese occupation of Shanghai. While NC-17 may be today’s equivalent of the X rating, it doesn’t have the same stigma attached, leaving “Lust, Caution,” perhaps, to pave the way for even more widespread acceptance of explicit sexual content in mainstream films.

Lee’s film is a palpable example of what can be painted with these new colors. Not only do the film’s encounters reach from the treetops of the sublime to the gnarled roots of the ridiculous, hitting every branch on the way down, but also something besides pleasure is exchanged between the characters.

Lee captures, without verbally articulating it, the profound transformation that the protagonist, played by Chinese actress Tang Wei, experiences as she learns things about herself that only intense erotic intimacy can teach.

In it, she goes from awkward guardedness as a neophyte executing an abhorrent duty to discovering an ardent connection as she figures out what she likes and who she is.

“A love scene, if it’s done well, can tell you a lot about character: How those people move, what they do, what grunts they make, that kind of thing,” says Thompson, who hadn’t yet seen “Lust, Caution.” “It’s one of the ways to reveal character, just like dialogue.”

But not everyone will be skilled enough -- or willing -- to dip their brushes.

‘Part of the plot’

“I think in ‘Lust, Caution’ it works properly, but in ‘Intimacy’ it looks silly,” Waters says. “It worked the very best in ‘Shortbus’ -- it was part of the plot, it was not gratuitous, it was sexy.”

Although the “real people having real sex” approach is something of a relief after years of the windblown hair and soft-core gymnastics of the so-called erotic thrillers of the ‘90s, “real sex” has always smacked of desperation, and “Tell Me You Love Me” sometimes pushes the boundaries of just how unexciting it can be to see good-looking people naked.

“I think watching regular people have sex is unappealing,” Waters says, “that’s why they have the porn people, to have these fake people having sex, people whose bodies are way hotter than anyone you’d ever be with. If you imagine people on the street naked, it’s a horror show.”

Mort disagrees, suggesting that hotness is in the eye of the beholder.

“I think that sex in Episode 3, where he’s angry and she needs him and she cries and he holds her -- to me, that’s beautiful. It’s not [considered] appealing because of what we’ve been taught in music, movies, magazines, everything,” Mort says.

“We’ve been taught that sex is this soft-focus, beautiful thing. And maybe at times it is, but sometimes it’s not.”

Thompson sees this all as one step toward a larger goal.

“What is going to bring us out of this Victorian mind-set,” Thompson says, “is if we get enough films and television shows that start using this material in ways that are artistically [rich], so that intelligent people respond. The great argument that the Parents Television Council often has is that so many of the shows that deal with this stuff are really trashy, and that’s really hard to defend. If we start churning out a body of work of really valuable stuff, like ‘The Sopranos’ -- that shut a lot of people up because it was so good and you needed that level of violence and sexuality.”