Carnal Knowledge

Philip Kaufman remembers Malle's The Lovers as one of the films that impressed him when he was first falling in love with movies. "I immediately start scanning European films when I think about sex in movies," Kaufman says. "American films are pretty empty when it comes to great sexual moments. I remember in Smiles of a Summer Night the scene when Harriet Andersson ran into the water nude. At the time it was astonishing to me. The eating scene in Tom Jones was interesting and funny. Just the way Albert Finney looked at Joyce Redman was very sexy. A glance can be highly erotic, though I'm not totally of the school that says less is more. Sometimes more is more."

In the sex scenes in his own movies, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June, Kaufman tried to pay as much attention to psychological reactions as to physical sensations. "For me eroticism and intelligence are linked," he says. "In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in the scene where the two women are photographing each other nude, the shot that made it really sexy was the close up of their faces. In Henry & June, the scene where the two women are making love in the brothel was played off the faces of Anais Nin and her husband watching. Without that added element, it wouldn't have had the same eroticism." Kaufman has just finished shooting Rising Sun, based on Michael Crichton's thriller about Japanese influence on American business. "I added one very sexy scene that was not in the book," Kaufman says.

Martha Coolidge is one of the few female directors who has ever been permitted to explore sexuality on-screen. Early in her career she made a gritty feature film based on her own date rape, Not a Pretty Picture, and in 1991 Rambling Rose won kudos for the delicate but candid bedroom scene between Laura Dern and 13-year-old Lukas Haas. "That scene kept the film from being made for years." Coolidge says, "but it was so honest. I talked to Lukas and his parents about it so that everyone would be clear about the scene. And I didn't overshoot it. I wanted it to be about their feelings. He gains empathy for her as a result of that encounter."

When asked to disclose her favorite sexual scenes, Coolidge replies, "There are a lot of them. I love sex in the movies, particularly when it reveals something about the characters. There's a scene in Bergman's The Touch when Bibi Andersson, who has this perfect husband and family, goes to this pig Elliott Gould. He almost rapes her while she's apologizing for every part of her body. I remember that scene vividly. It said so much about how you can connect to someone's neurosis through sex. Peckinpah's Straw Dogs I found fascinating even though I completely disagree with his view of rape. But that movie helped me to understand certain men. I suppose the most wonderful love scenes were created before they could show sex on-screen, because the actors understood how to convey desire. We have to work harder to convey that now that we can show more."

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