Carnal Knowledge

Paul Schrader considers the sex scenes in Basic Instinct to be a perfect blend of explicitness and indirection. "I thought Verhoeven and Eszterhas got it just right," Schrader says. "There was just enough sex to grab attention, but actually the big scene in that movie is 99 percent tease, and I think that's the way it should be. People don't really want to see sex. They want to almost see it."

Like many of these other directors, Schrader suggests that one of the challenges in filming sexual interludes is making the actors feel comfortable. "It's very hard to have nude actors acting," he says. "When I have a sex scene, I always discuss it beforehand. I'll do a rough storyboard and tell the actors we're going to have seven different setups, so they'll know exactly what to expect. Some actors are more comfortable than others. Willem Dafoe has acted nude at the Wooster Group, and it's a lot harder to do that in front of 50 people on folding chairs at an off-Broadway theater than in front of a camera crew. I've never really had a problem with an actor, but in Cat People Nastassia Kinski had second thoughts after we shot the sex scenes and went to Ned Tanen at Universal and tried to get him to cut them out. But he decided they were necessary to the movie."

To Schrader, sexuality in cinema is never an end in itself. "I used the sex scene in Light Sleeper as a dramatic bookmark, to end a certain part of the story," Schrader says. "After that scene, the plot really kicks in. In American Gigolo I had to show some sex because that was the subject, and I didn't want the audience to think I was being unduly coy. But I don't think sex scenes really strike at the core of why people go to movies."

Nicolas Roeg has been embroiled in controversy throughout his career. His very first movie as a director, Performance (which he co-directed with Donald Cammell), earned one of the first X ratings from the MPAA. Don't Look Now had to be trimmed to get an R rating, and Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession also went out with an X rating before being edited and re-released. Roeg remembers battling with the censors over Don't Look Now. "The censor said, 'We have an absolute rule. No pubic hair.'" Roeg recalls. "I said, 'There isn't any.' He had seen something in the film that wasn't there." The sex scene in that movie--the intercutting of Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland making love with images of the two of them getting dressed afterwards--is one of the most memorable of all erotic sequences, capturing both the transcience of sexual ecstasy and the way in which the memory of sex can transfigure the most mundane activities.

"Belle de Jour was one of the most sensual films I've ever seen," Roeg muses. "I remember seeing it in London when it first opened. Couples went into the cinema hand in hand, but gradually as the movie went on, a hand was slipped out of another hand. The scene when Catherine Deneuve comes back after a day at the brothel and throws her panties into the fire caught something about the secret game of sex. Now everyone tries to say there's a right way to perform sex, but that's hopeless. Sex is a secret game between two or three people or only one. The most erotic scenes to me are the most truthful. In the original Cape Fear there's a scene where Robert Mitchum is on the boat with Polly Bergen. He's a beast, and yet there's a glimmer of attraction that she feels. She hales him and hates herself because she recognizes that attraction."

Roeg is bemused by the attempts to regulate and modulate sexuality, both on and off the screen. "I was reading an article about a clinic in Arizona for sex addiction," Roeg says. "I suppose I should be in one of those clinics, but I have no intention of being cured. I hope I remain sex-mad into my dotage."

Stephen Father is Movieline's film critic.

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