Sep. 11, 2007 - Issue #621: Sex in The City 07

DVD Detective

Dumont's sexistentialist Twentynine Palms

Alice: “ ... you know there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible?”
Bill: “What’s that?”
Alice: “Fuck.”

— the final lines of Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s last film Soft lighting. The couple’s under the sheets, delicately covered, but there’s some titillating female nudity. The man’s on top. The woman always has a gentle orgasm. So comes, and goes, the typical Hollywood-safe sex scene, about as realistic as our hope that our parents only did the dirty deed exactly as many times as they have children.

Cinema has always teased and seduced, from the black-and-white days of mere suggestion to the moment Bertolucci and Brando tangoed us into a Parisian world of butter-aided kinks. But now, in its second century, is cinema flirting with pornography?

Lately, movies hype climaxes for real, penetrative sex. Actors are losing their clothes, inhibitions and on-screen virginity. The apparently genuine sex scenes in Ang Lee’s latest (Lust, Caution) follow the in-your-face Shortbus and 9 Songs. Catherine Breillat has shoved most of everything before the lens, while other female directors have taken a more fragmented, allusive approach—Claire Denis, for Vendredi Soir, and Andrea Arnold, for Red Road, use oddly angled close shots.
But art-film pretensions can’t always protect explicitness from the cinematically transmitted disease of voyeurism when the medium has such a long history of males gazing at scantily clothed women (only adding to the repressive notion that nudity is sexual). Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven, for example, tosses off shots of a young rich girl casually pleasuring her overweight chauffeur.
So when does sex service the story? When is it just porn? And are people watching because cine-coitus is like cooking shows on TV: a lot of the time, we’d rather watch others doing it than bother to do it ourselves? (“Honey, I’m too tired tonight—let’s just make love vicariously through the Shortbus orgy scene.”)

Fewer directors have been more explicit yet unconventional and disturbing in their graphic un-coverage of sex than Bruno Dumont, a French philosophy professor turned filmmaker. One of the first shots in his Cannes award-winning anti-mystery Humanité (1999) initially seems crass and violating, yet there is a strange, unsettlingly cold poetry to it.
David Cronenberg (head of the jury that awarded Humanité its prize), too, has offered up sex in pointedly anti-voyeuristic, even coldly unaffecting ways—just watch the stair sex scene in A History of Violence or pretty much all of Crash—as if bodies are simply interfacing or colliding with each other.

This is sex as the humble, even pathetic natural urge, the great equalizer that makes us no different, at bottom, from any other creature. It’s the glamour and tab “ooh” factor that’s built up around it—especially by movies—that’s profitably kept it so prurient and perversely fascinating in our culture.

In its mechanical repetition, porn, too, reduces sex to the coldly animal, but it’s the messiness of emotions and obsessions, not body fluids, that drenches Crash and Dumont’s third feature, Twentynine Palms (2003), only available in a few Edmonton rental stores. Denounced by many critics, the film follows a couple who take a film location-scouting trip to the California desert town, fight and have (obviously real) sex.

Dumont, in an interview on the Wellspring DVD, calls the film an experiment in a kind of extreme American horror film, a “savage love story” that explores the inherent violence of love. Twentynine Palms does so through a sort of minimalist, near-absurd, vicious sexistentialism. (The effect is a little like if Waiting For Godot were pared down to the bone and adapted by Peckinpah.)

Dumont’s remarkable aesthetic is a strange combination of the detached and the visceral. This film is not to most tastes yet seems almost uninterested in an audience. Here, low-angle scenes and panoramas of the eerie expanse of the Western landscape build a sense of physical menace. In this eerily hollow, arid industrial America, lust and anger are on flip sides of a switchblade and humans return to an Eden stripped nearly bare, where they’re swallowed up by nature’s immensity.

The couple are scrapping their way through love—David (David Wissak) is by turns reticent and rough with Katia (Katia Golubeva), who often seems on the verge of a breakdown. Their sex is urgent, desperate, almost coarse and increasingly confused with an emotional brutality. The final scenes are savagely devastating, but not unexpected—throughout, a narcissistic, wayward American male rage can only find release in a confusion of sex and violence.

On-screen sex is usually just more entertainment in movies that Dumont calls a “cinema of distraction,” but the sex in Twentynine Palms reflects a dark truth, echoed in his country’s word for orgasm, “petit mort.” Ultimately, this startling, strange cine-philosophical experiment throws all the usual voyeuristic conventions of film into such sudden, screeching reverse that sex, we’re reminded, is not just the driving force of life but a shuddering foretaste of the end to come. V

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