Carnal Knowledge

Jean-Jacques Annaud found it a challenge to imagine sexual encounters from a young woman's point of view when he directed The Lover, adapted from a semiautobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras. Annaud had never done an out-and-out erotic movie before The Lover, though Quest for Fire had some striking sexual encounters (including one in which a caveman discovers the missionary position), and even The Name of the Rose had a powerful sex scene between Christian Slater and a mute peasant girl. "I want people to understand their instincts," Annaud says. "That's why I made Quest for Fire and The Bear and now this film. I really made The Lover for my two teenage daughters. It's been fascinating to me to release this movie, to see how different countries respond. The movie was rated G in France, whereas in America it was given an NC-17."

In recalling memorable films about sex, Annaud cites Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, a drama about an obsessive love affair that features hardcore sex scenes and ends with the woman murdering and castrating her lover. "That was a very honest approach," Annaud says, "though for my tastes it goes too far. Yet it was very daring. I was fascinated by it." In deciding how to film his own sex scenes. Annaud was haunted by Oshima's graphic approach. "The explicitness was a step too much for me," he notes. "I wanted to imagine more and see less. At the same time I didn't believe you could take the approach of so many films that pan to a window or to the ocean during a love scene.

"If you shoot through the gauze of mosquito nets, you turn the audience into voyeurs. In every other scene you put the camera where the audience can see the best, and I believe you have to do the same thing in love scenes. You must make it clear that you are not afraid of what you are showing. But you have to allow some room for imagination. When we make love, we close our eyes and turn off the lights, not because the church tells us to, but because we want to use our imaginations."

Ron Shelton's most vividly remembered erotic scene is 180 degrees from the hard-core explicitness of In the Realm of the Senses. "There's a scene in The Lady Eve." Shelton says, "where Henry Fonda is trying to fit Barbara Stanwyck's shoe on. It goes on for about four minutes. He's on his knees, and she's in complete command. That is one of the sexiest scenes I've ever seen. It's presumably about something else, and yet all of the undertone is sex."

Shelton's playful sex scenes in Bull Durham, Blaze and While Men Can't Jump have won praise for their free-wheeling lustiness. In working with his actors, Shelton says, "We try to get comfortable and have a good time. I schedule those scenes for late in the shooting. The sex scenes were the last three days of Bull Durham, the last week of Blaze. Paul Newman was nervous because he had never done a sex scene. I told him we're going to have fun, and we came up with the scene where she is eating the watermelon while she's on top of him. My view is that sex is fun and absurd. I don't have fake orgasms--no agonized, wrinkled brows. I hale that. You can be taken out of the movie by a moment that's too graphic. There's nothing less interesting than a closeup of penetration."

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