As Cold Mountain proved, sex on screen isn't just about skin and sweat, it's about disrobing and robing again.
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Near the close of Cold Mountain, the lovers who have been for so long separated come together. "What else can they do?" you might ask, in an $80-million-plus romance starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law--people the camera loves and characters who have been kept by war and distance from doing those things lovers do, and things movie audiences have always wanted them to do? Yet the result is all wrong. For two people who have barely survived the hardships of war--who must have been as hungry, year after year, as Scarlett O'Hara vowed never to be again--turn out to be silky, golden, full-skinned bodies from Playboy and that genre. And director Anthony Minghella doesn't know another way to film them, except to offer fleeting glimpses of the real Nicole and Jude in some amber-hued swoon of "great sex," according to the movies. The terrible leanness, the desperate shyness of two people who must be virgins still, to say nothing of the styles of eroticism in the 1860s, are out the window.
Of course, we hardly know how people fucked in 1864, let alone took off all those clothes--those endless clothes of that day--but I think we know Cold Mountain got it wrong. Not for the first time in that film, the real characters from the book and from 1860s Carolinas have slipped through the holes.
For most of the history of the movies, there has been a huge yearning from us in the dark reaching up to the screen, whispering to those beauties, "Wear less. Take it off." And I think we all take it for granted that, given a true lovemaking scene, there is unavoidable embarrassment for the actors, who may not even like one another. (Apparently not the case with Kidman and Law.) As I thought about such scenes, my mind went back to a classic--to Don't Look Now--and I began to realize how much such scenes, to be truthful, need to be about the clothes.
For those of you who may not recall, Don't Look Now was made in 1973, directed by Nicolas Roeg, based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier. In the film, art restorer John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) have two children, a boy and a girl, and in the first scene of the film, the girl drowns in a pond on their rural property in England. It is a terrible, traumatic accident, and the Baxters go off to Venice, Italy, to recover.
There's much more to the film, but I hardly need to talk about it here. About half an hour into the movie, there is a scene of John and Laura in their hotel room in Venice. They are relaxed, intimate, but nothing happens. He takes a shower, she takes a bath--the actors and the characters are quite naked; we see their pubic hair and think no more of it than the characters might.
But they do think about it. Nothing is said, but I'd guess it is the first time they have made love since the loss of their daughter. Casually at first, lying on the bed, reading, she strokes his flank. There is no talk. But they become their old selves, lovers, stark-naked. And then Roeg reveals his strategy: for the lovemaking is intercut with shots of the two of them getting dressed afterwards before going out to dinner. Of course, it might not be immediately afterwards--but it is the same hotel suite where they are lovers, and the montage is covered by the same silence, except for flute and piano. The fragments of sex are tender, funny and caring--I don't think it's going too far to say that the viewer feels the rapport, or the friendship, between Christie and Sutherland, even if they just fell into the scene, as if to say, "Well, if we have to do this, we might as well be friends and enjoy it."
There's a very delicate point here about love and sex: that people who have sex together are likely to fall in love. I know that grown-ups say they can handle such things in a strictly professional way. But I think the gift and sharing of sex, the revelation and the talk that come after it, are profound causes of love itself. And in Don't Look Now it is a tribute to the actors to say we believe in their love.
But the dressing is then all the more remarkable. After all, while lovers do very often help one another to undress--here, let me master those tricky buttons, that odd behind-your-back clip, let me draw the stockings off your legs like a first skin--dressing afterwards is private, it is personal, it is necessary, it is a first return to solitude. We see Christie drawing tight black pants up over her panties; we see a fine gray jersey cardigan going on--no bra. We see Sutherland knotting a woolen tie--and a man is supposed to be able to tie his own tie, isn't he?
The faces are fond still, post-coital, wistful, but as the clothes go back on, so the steady state of living--the separateness of minds-- resumes, no matter that bodies recently were locked in the warmth of mixed bodily fluids. It's a great scene because of the way it places sex in life, and I wish that Cold Mountain had been brave enough to give us just the shots of Ada and Inman (so lately in her) getting dressed afterwards.
Am I saying that every sex scene has to be turned inside-out? No, but sex scenes have become so standard, so clichéd, that they need to be rethought. And just as clothes in sex often end up inside-out, tossed on the floor in extraordinary, eloquent shapes, so sex only works in films if we feel the people have been revolutionized.
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