Adventurous filmmakers keep trying to incorporate graphic sex in serious movies, but only a few of them have figured out a way to do it without the results looking like porn.
John Cameron Mitchell’s “Shortbus” and Marco Bellochio’s “Devil in the Flesh” work because the directors made their actors so comfortable that the sex scenes didn’t appear to be exploiting the performers.
In Mitchell’s case, he spent months working with his cast on improvisations and test videos before he started shooting the movie itself.
Europeans have ventured into this territory more often than American indies, because this type of material doesn’t carry as much of a stigma there as it does here, but they haven’t been much more successful.
Pictures ranging from the British “9 Songs” to the French “Romance” have
come to a grinding halt — no pun intended — as soon as the actors have taken off their clothes and started behaving like the stars of XXX-rated fare.
The other night I watched an advance screener of the Strand Releasing DVD of the German film, “Bedways,” which is about an experimental filmmaker (Miriam Mayet, above) who wants to make a cutting edge drama that uses the unsimulated sex of porn films to examine the sex lives of her two characters.
Director R.P. Kahl has his protagonist Nina dealing with issues that he no doubt had to explore when he made “Bedways”: Can you expect actors to go all the way in terms of sex while still playing a fictional character? Will nudity and graphic sex throw the audience out of his story? Has the porn explosion of the past 40 years completely co-opted the serious treatment of sex in seriously intended movies.
“Bedways” succeeds for much of its running time because the movie-within-a-movie format allows the director and his on-screen surrogate to address all of the issues it raises.
Mayet gives a remarkably unihibited performance as the filmmaker and Matthias Faust and Lana Cooper (below) draw us into the actors’ fears of revealing themselves so intimately on screen (the “real” actors no doubt went through the same process as the characters they play).
As interesting as “Bedways” is, however, the movie does seem to go off-track when the performers begin to engage in what appears to be unsimulated sex.
We get caught up in the actors’ apparent decision to go all the way rather than the dilemma of the characters in the film and the story shuts down.
Still, this is a valid and honorable attempt to push the envelope and is well worth watching (the DVD will be released June 21).
