Borak: Sex and The Cinema

“Bola-bola. You mau tengok kah?” said the DVD seller over my shoulder. He opened his palms in front of his chest, jiggled them a bit, and pointed me (thumbs up!) to the latest sequel to American Pie. It's already bad enough that I looked the way I was (KFC-stained tee, sandals, shorts), but having a pusher recommending to me the lowest common denominator of cinematic sex—the low-budgeted frat boy comedy—sure as hell didn't bolster my image in what was a packed shop of middle-aged mums and their 12-year-old daughters.

“Erotic! The most controversial film of the year! Unrated! 100% Uncut!”—I'm sure you've come across these and other similar exclamations on your DVD cover at one time or another. And as pick up lines go, they promise much, but seldom do they deliver anything more than five minutes (add ten if it's European) of a tepid sex scene—a disappointment that I'm sure will become more obvious among as Valentine's Day edges closer.

Though sex and the cinema have an association that stretches back decades, capturing a good sex scene on film remains elusive. It's one of the industry's ironies that even as cinema becomes more tolerant, pornography becomes more prevalent, and audiences desensitised, I can't remember more than a handful of memorable films that incorporated a great scene (insert Mrs Palmer joke here).

Like many teens growing up in the '90s, Basic Instinct was (look away now, dad) my initiation into the world of cinematic sex. Back then, Sharon Stone's scene had attained a near-mythical status, fueled by canteen gossip in an all-boys’ school. The videotape was hard to come by to those under 18—yes, even video rental shops had a moral conscience back then—but thankfully through some loophole (my brother) I finally got a blurry copy when I was 15. Of course, for anyone that age with limited contacts with things called girls, watching Stone's performance convinced me that this was what cinematic sex scenes would ever amount to.

And being a time when the erotic thriller genre was raging, you could forgive my limited imagination then. Like Seth Rogen's character in Knocked Up who time-marked sex scenes for a living, it didn't take much effort for me to figure it out—typically, you'd expect a scene at 20 minutes, another at 50 minutes, and nothing after that time mark, because that's when the chick usually goes psycho and starts butchering everyone. And no hero wants to hit that, even if she's Jane March.

Obviously, there weren't many movies I completed in my teens.

It was becoming all too predictable until Larry Clark's Kids came along. I had heard of the movie due to its controversial nature, but watching it just blew me away in an epiphanic sense. Calling Clark's work “daring” would be like calling the late Evil Knievel an efficient motorcyclist; he reinvented the sex scene for me. Gone were the predictable moans and groans, and in its place was something raw, carnal, passionate, repressed, and angry. He explored the human, and not the easily written pornographic side, and in my book that's as complex as a film can get (you try writing one). And oh, I finished the movie.

Likewise, other great directors like Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango In Paris), Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams), Ang Lee (Lust, Caution) have understood that sex, stripped from the context, stripped from emotion and meaning, is merely a derivative of porn; it's just a question of it being soft or hard. Either way, in a time of peer-to-peer and youporn, that kind of soft-core controversy and “sex sells” marketing pull has little impact anymore. Basic Instinct? Meh. It's lame by today's standards.

As in real life as it is on film, however, not all sex turns out the way as one imagines it to be. Brilliant directors too often think they've got it made because some big-name actress decides sheds her clothes to perk up a saggy career.

Among the disastrous trysts I have in my collection include Jane Campion's In The Cut, where Meg Ryan's “darker side of passion” made me want to re-rent You've Got Mail. Then there was Basic Instinct 2, which pretty much binned any fantasy value Sharon Stone had left; and Showgirls, in which Elizabeth Berkeley's passionate attempts at thrashing about held less excitement than watching the 1500m freestyle relay.

Still, for those who manage to walk the line between the pornographic and sexual, there can be few greater achievements than this: to be lauded as controversial and genius at the same time. That's a rare accolade—people till today, still speak in reverent tones of Marlon Brando's butter scene in Last Tango In Paris 35 years after it first elicited a gasp. Not that any of this rambling would really matter to the dealer with two palms on his chest asking me I want to check out his 5-star collection.

Err, no thanks.

John Lim is still pretending to be a cinema buff. E-mail him at john@klue.com.my if you think that he's just talking out his butt. Compliments welcomed.