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An error has ocurred. Please try againIn Ancient Greece, scenes of frenetic, satirical copulations were depicted on vases, when at the same time the ideal love was of a platonic nature.
During the Middle Ages, sex was just for reproduction. Romantic lovers of the epics never had sex, and their love was as sacred as the divine love for God.
I don’t know what was happening at the same around the globe, in China, the Americas or in Africa (even though the Kama Sutra gives us a colorful idea of what Indians believed about what sex – the divine union of two bodies – had to do with love) but I strongly believe that every culture treated this very specific feature of human nature – the search for pleasure and the search for fulfillment through another person – and the relationship between them, trying to find answers.
Modernity rediscovered the human body aside from religious or other impediments. Cinema is child of this modernity – the seventh art – and very soon tried to answer to questions about love and sexuality. However, this topic was mostly dealt with after the 60’s cultural and sexual revolution that changed forever modern family’s landscape and challenged traditional sex roles. Today, living in the wastewater of those staggering decades, cineastes from all over the globe come over and over to the question of how sex is related to love. Or vice versa.
There could be many films to add to this list. Even though it covers the last 40 years, the emphasis is given to recent movies, as each society at each time tries to give its own answers to this topic, which is fundamental for human relationships. The answers quite differ, and some are rather surprising.
1. Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989)
Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)
The typical case of a director and scenario writer whose first picture was amazingly better than any other of his later works, no matter the prizes and recognition. “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” is a masterpiece!
It’s a story of four people, two men and two women – Ann, and her husband John, a successful lawyer; Ann’s sister Cynthia; and John’s old friend Graham. Ann is a gorgeous woman, but she is sexually cold. John has long given up any effort to have any physical contact with her and has a passionate affair with Cynthia, who is totally different from her sister: she is a constant orgasm seeker. The life of this triangle goes on with Ann keeping house and Cynthia and John getting laid whenever they can, until Graham appears on the scene.
Graham is the exact opposite of John, just as Cynthia is of Ann: he is a loser, not working, having not achieved anything, and he is sexually impotent. His main sexual activity is filming video tapes with women who narrate their sexual lives and then masturbating while watching them. It is his own personal way to get through a relationship that didn’t work.
So it is not just four people. There are two couples: the ones who are sexually “healthy” and their relationships are based on intercourse – we don’t see them talking about things other than sex. And this sexually based relationship is based on a lie.
The other ones are sexually and socially crippled. He is impotent, she is cold. But they are true. They accept what they are as a state, not an inability. And they talk about it. While the first couple is having sex, the other is talking about intimate things. And this conversation oozes affection. On one side of the screen it is lust, on the other, love. A crippled, undefended love, but yet it is love. Ann and Graham have to surpass many obstacles to get close to each other. But when they finally do, their mating has a totally different quality from the totally different couple we have watched before.
Having sex as a result of loving, of confiding in somebody, of letting one’s ego melt into the other’s. That was “Sex, Lies, and Videotapes” – a small treaty about the relationship between sex and love!
2. Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996)
breaking-the-waves
Well, this is a purely metaphysical view on the subject of this list; that is, the relationship between love and sex. A peculiar story featured by a peculiar director, set in an austere religious community somewhere in the north of Scotland, where the open grey horizons of North Sea dominate the landscape.
Bess is the ‘fool’ of the community, a young sensitive girl with an open heart who doesn’t get along well with reality. Having been institutionalized in the past, when she falls for Jan, a Danish oil rig worker, she finds her place in the universe and gives herself to him body and soul. When Jan leaves for the rig, she is devastated and prays day and night for his return. And when Jan returns paralyzed due to an accident on the rig, she believes it is her fault.
Jan asks her to go on with her life and have sex with other men, and Bess interprets it as if it is her mission to have sex with as many men as possible, even to be maltreated, as a means to cure her beloved husband. Once set to action, trying to have sex in all the most unbelievable places under whatever condition, nobody can change her mind. And she finally achieves in curing her husband, sacrificing her own life.
Lars von Trier’s first film of the “Golden Heart” trilogy is a hymn to love in its very Christian sense, that binds it with self sacrifice. “Love… always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres … The greatest of these all is love,” recited Paul to the Corinthians. Love is the absolute emotion, the absolute value in von Trier’s moral universe in this particular film.
Bess, as a multiplied reincarnation of the holy spirit, is ready to sacrifice herself not for the evils of all the humanity, but for the life of the man she loves. Sex is not something inside or outside this relationship. It is a vehicle of showing love, either by offering pleasure to the beloved one or by offering the body to be used by the most undesired and dangerous people.
“Love is patient, love is kind.” Furthermore, love is divine, knows no moral boundaries set by people. The sound of bells enters triumphantly as Jan buries his wife in the ever silent cemetery. Love has won!
3. That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, 1977)
Luis Buñuel has treated the subject of human (especially feminine) sexuality in several of his former films (‘Belle de Jour,” “Tristana” and “Viridiana” are some examples) but it is his very last one that is chosen for this list. The grand auteur surrealist made a movie about the duality – and vanity – of human erotic relations through the story of an impossible love affair between a middle-aged French intellectual and his 19-year-old former chambermaid Conchita.
I saw the film three times until I realized the obvious: young Conchita was interpreted by two different actresses, one French and one Spanish. It is said that Buñuel liked both of them during casting and couldn’t decided which of them should play Conchita. That sounds very much like him. But there are also very blatant differences between their role: differences in their looks, their behavior, their importance for the script.
The two Conchitas represent the duality this list is about to discuss: love and sex; ethereal, divine love and lustful search of corporal intercourse; the intellect and the body. They both torture Mathieu, the tormented aging male who seeks eternal spring in the mind and the body of a much younger woman, who always remains a futile dream, just as is personal fulfillment through the other person.
4. Scenes of a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1974)
Scenes-from-a-Marriage
A monumental, highly psychographic work that tracks down the relationship of a couple as they go from familial happiness to infidelity and a painful divorce, new mating, and after all that, they rediscover their love for each other in a film that could easily be called “Scenes from an Ex-Marriage.”
Marianne and Johan are a model couple – success in work, harmony in the family. Until Johan confesses that he has gone crazy about a woman and intends to leave Marianne. Bergman follows the (ex) couple for the next few years, as they get married to different people, meet, fight, make love, and finally find happiness and fulfillment as secret lovers who cheat on their husband and wife, respectively.
The subtle balances between deep love and sexual pleasure that needs renewing is dealt with by the great Swedish director in a masterly way. Through scenes with long dialogue, we follow the course of a relationship as it passes all the stages, resuming that what they asked from each other was a way to inflame their faded passion, since their deep love was given.
5. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Every movie that Kubrick has released has been subject to consequent analysis, as he always used symbolism and every minor detail in his mise-en-scene meant much more than it seemed to. The same happened for his last and quite obscure work, the one he never saw released in theaters or analyzed as he passed away just after finishing the final cut.
The main topic of this film was love and sexual relations. The protagonists are a young, beautiful and successful couple; they are obviously bored with their sex life and try, through imagination or by forcing reality, to find ways to revive their lust.
Alice confesses to William, her successful doctor husband, that she had erotic fantasies with a young officer some months ago. William cannot take this out of his mind and he goes out in New York at night seeking a revitalizing sexual adventure. That leads him to a sinister villa in the outskirts of the city, where masked people are performing an devilish ceremony and then set upon a limitless orgy. However, this unspoken adventure seems to entail great dangers.
Alice, on her end, escapes the monotony of her married life through dreams – an updated Alice in Wonderland? She dreams her own version of William’s adventures. William confesses everything to her and they are both terrified. What is left now? Return to the family harbor and have sex with each other, of course.
A critical view toward American ethics, family and monogamy. Sex is safe only into marriage. Outside there is perversion, puerility, AIDS, and psychical disturbances.
6. In the Mood for Love (Kar- Wai Wong, 2000)
In The Mood For Love
Acclaimed by many as the best movie of the 21st century, this is a romantic story of two people, a man and a woman, whose mates deceive them with one another.
Su-li Zhen is married to a traveling businessman. Chow Mo-wan is married to a woman who is often absent. We never see their faces. They don’t matter. What matters is that Su-li and Chow, out of despair for their unfaithful mates, engage themselves in an intimate relationship that could be but isn’t a love affair.
It is a film where love, or rather “the mood for love” reigns, while sex is not mentioned or even implied. Su-li and Chow are like the platonic lovers of medieval epics and early Romantic novels, while Wong creates a universe where shared feelings of affection prevail and lust just defines an intangible line between what people want and what they really do.
Sex is not the target – the dead end one may call – of a romantic relationship. Unspoken words and touches never meant to go further than reiterating the feeling of being accomplished without being fulfilled. A dispersed melancholy – together with the elegant parade of every kind of printed cloth in Hong Kong – leaves a bittersweet aftertaste of underlying desires.
7. Intimacy (Patrice Chéraux, 2001)
Can physical sexual contact be a simply corporal affair? Kureshi and Chéraux claim that it cannot. Two bodies that come into contact cannot just limit themselves to skin-to-skin touch. Something deeper emerges.
That is the case of Jay and Claire. They meet every Wednesday in Jay’s derelict house; they do not know each other’s name, they barely speak to each other, they have passionate sex, and then they separate with no goodbyes and meet back next Wednesday.
The film was criticized for its very vivid, unsimulated sex scenes – the first ones not to be cut by censorship in the UK. This served a purpose, and the purpose was surely not a pornographic one. By showing the sexual act in a non-mediated way, we get full perception of its intensity and the intimacy it implies, whether the lovers want to accept it or not. Throughout the movie we realize that both of them are deeply in love with each other, in a way they could have never imagined. Or pronounced.
“It could be anything, and yet it was always the same thing. It was an act of love. Even if it was special. Even if people don’t understand. Even if they find it sick, even if it was purely sexual at first, that’s what it was all the time, an act of love.”
That is how the protagonist of the film describes her ‘blind date’ sexual relationships with a younger man she met after publishing an erotic ad. Their relationship is purely confined to their weekly meetings and in this way it is paralleled with Chéraux’s “Intimacy,” though in a more romantic way.
Each time they meet in a café, they talk before going to a lovely hotel next to the bar, and there they “live their fantasies,” as they both confess to an unseen person who interviews them apart, after the end of their relationship.
As time goes by, they realize, each one for themselves that they are deeply in love with each other. Nevertheless, when they come to talk about their future, she confesses her love but they both agree that it couldn’t work out.They make love one last time and then they never see each other.
So sex produces love. Or is it the other way around?
9. A febre do rato (Clàudio Assis, 2011)
Braziu! Amazon’s estuary! The land of the L’s! Love, lust, leisure, longing!
Zizou is an anarchist street poet. He rimes in the streets of Recife and during the nights he makes love to older women in a barrel in his backyard.
Around him there is a vivid community of people who, against their poverty, enjoy life, love and sex. Juliano, Mateus and Tania live, sleep, drink, dance, and play music together. Vitor is the man Marianna has mostly loved through her life. Marianna is the man Vitor has mostly loved in his life!
And then comes Eneida. She comes from the other part of the city, from the wealthy part. They are both fiercely attracted to one another; Zizou dreams of her day and night and she becomes his muse. Yet, they do not dare to have sex. Zizou keeps having sex with his elderly lovers in the barrel and Eneida masturbates in her bed thinking of him. Their love is idealized; on another level, it is somehow poetry.
When, in the national feast of the city, Zizou jumps onto a van crying “anarchy and sex,” Eneida climbs to the van taking off her clothes, ready to unite her body with his in front of all the people, as part of a love ritual. He also takes off his clothes and everybody around waits, holding their breath for the unbelievable to happen. But it doesn’t happen. The riot police breaks in, arrest Zizou and throw him into the river to be eaten by the city’s rats. Symbolic?
10. On Body and Soul (Indikó Enyedi, 2017)
The loving couple of this movie share disabilities: one is physically and the other mentally crippled. Endre, a chief financial official in an abattoir, is a handsome man with a lame left hand. Maria, a pretty young woman who comes to work as an inspector, is an Asperger autistic, as we come to know through her reactions, and she is constantly learning how to feel and behave.
However, their disabilities are not seen as a deficiency, rather as a way to perceive reality through a different prism. Endre and Maria share every night the sema dream: they are the male and female deer who run wild in the forest.
Here the love path follows a very distinct way. From subconscious to conscious, from dream to reality, from isolation to love. In this film, in this story, sex comes to crown the mating of the souls in a most beautiful and bizarre lovemaking scene.
11. Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)
In some movies it is love that prevails; in others, like this one, it is purely sex. It is the story of a dysfunctional, young and handsome executive who lives alone in a flat in New York, where he passes his days watching pornography and taking on one night stands, as he is incapable of having any kind of emotional involvement with people.
When his younger sister Sissy arrives unexpectedly for an infinite stay, the fluidness of uncontrolled sentimentality she brings into his life is unbearable – their emotional instability that reaches the extremes of frigidity on one hand, or hypersensitivity on the other, is due to an undefined past of abuse and love deficiency – and Brandon, the young hero, gets out of control.
Whichever side you look at, Brandon’s or Sissy’s, there is a problematic relationship between love and sex. Brandon, in particular, is totally incapable of letting any kind of feeling interfere with sexual pleasure, defining the verges of sexual addiction. His emotionally arid world matches with the grey landscapes of the mega city, the faceless subway scenes, and the impersonal human – and erotic – contact, writing Brandon up in pantheon of cinematic modern heroes.
12. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Philip Kaufman, 1988)
The-Unbearable-Lightness-of-Being
“Every woman has a slight difference, a particularity when she had sex. Like the woman he made love this afternoon, that got red spots in her face while having an orgasm. Tomas was searching this particularity in every woman he hunted.”
That is more or less how Kundera describes his protagonist in the homonymous novel in which the movie was based. Tomas is a doctor who lives in Prague under the socialist regime and he is a devoted womanizer. When he is not practicing medicine, he is after women. All kinds of women. Tall and short, beautiful and less beautiful, artists and waitresses. Being divorced, he steadily avoids any kind of commitment and simply enjoys sex.
And then comes Tereza. A waitress from a small Czechoslovakian town who moves to Prague and into Tomas’ life. Tereza is a strict monogamist; she believes that making love with someone is absolutely tied with feeling love for someone. She wants Tomas just for herself and suffers from his infidelities. Their relationship seems to be a struggle between absolute devotion and limitless freedom.
Absolute devotion is what finally wins in this story. Or love over sex. Tomas and Tereza finally find happiness isolated in a small village, with elementary goods and, most importantly, each other.
13. She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986)
She's Gotta Have It
Among all those social dramas, here comes a comedy! The first feature of Spike Lee is an urban case study, the story of Nora, a liberated young African-American woman who doesn’t want to be restrained by social conventions. Why only one boyfriend when she can have three?
She lives in an impressive studio in downtown New York, with a king-size double bed in the middle, lighted by more than a hundred candles, and there she receives her loving mates to have sex and fun with them. Because having sex is having fun… and the opposite.
Though she’s attracted to and in love with Jamie, she finds it is natural to have more than one lover… because love is one thing and sex is another.
Nobody else but her finds this attitude and her beliefs normal. Jamie is hurt for her not being exclusively his; Greer, her other lover, accuses her of being a sex addict and suggest that she sees a therapist. Mars (Spike Lee), the ‘underpants’ man, wonders why he is not the chosen one. Everyone believes she’s gotta have it.
But no. Nora goes her own way, leaving Jamie behind when he blackmails her that it would be only him or nothing, a modern heroine of the post-feminist era. She goes on searching for her gender and sexual identity, she goes on questioning the relationship between love and sex with no taboos or prohibitions. A genuine Spike Lee suffragette! Or Simone de Beauvoir! Gloria Steinem? Angela Davis? All of them? None of them? Just the girl next door?
14. Crimes of Passion (Ken Russell, 1984)
Crimes of Passion (1984)
A film that was quickly forgotten, one more of Russell’s provocative version of stories on sexuality linked with prostitution. And where is love found in this context?
Joanna Crane is a fashion designer who every night turns herself into ‘China Blue,’ a sex worker who fulfills the inner sadomasochist desires of men. She herself avoids any close contact and gets pleasure through these distorted relations. Until one day Peter arrives at her door as a customer. Peter is a father of two, unhappily trapped in a marriage that no longer means anything to him.
As he reaches China Blue searching for new experiences, their sexual mating has such an inner force that changes both their lives. It leads him to leave his family and her to reconsider her stances about sex and love.
Corporal contact may be a means to discover what links someone with the other and forward a relationship to the next step. Bodies mostly speak more frankly than language.
15. Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)
Last but not least, a movie about love – and sexual pleasure – in a totally different, new age, digital frame. An original screenplay that was awarded an Oscar, this movie approaches man-woman relationships in the times of developed operating systems.
Theodore is a lonely writer who finally finds comfort and understanding with Samantha, his newly bought operating system with the highest level of artificial intelligence on the market. What a relief! Somebody always there to listen to you, share your thoughts, soothe you and console you, excite you and amuse you, make you feel special without ever hurting you. Somebody available all day and all night.
What’s wrong with having no touch? Or smells? Or sight? Or taste? In the digital age, a relationship can be based on hearing only. Seems that what we mostly need is being heard.
No, we also need exclusiveness. Maybe sex may change form, it may not mean the meeting of two – or more – bodies but something totally different, but the quintessence of love, the preferred one, that cannot change even in a relationship with a device. In love we need to be the one, not one in a million.
Author Bio: Regina Zervou is cultural sociologist who took some fifteen years to move from carnival and popular culture studies to cinema theory. An afficionado of movies since she was twelve, she loves the way reality and ‘surreality’ is depicted on the screen. When not watching movies, she loves walking the dogs, swimming, cooking for her children or traveling someplace in Africa or South America to take some pictures.
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Watching the films of Èric Rohmer are a lot like drinking coffee. You might not like the taste right away, or may not think you like it before you even try it, but once you start to like it then soon you can’t live without it. Nearly every film taking on a different aspect of love within a deeply humanist frame, Rohmer’s movies are truly unique.
The only American director who comes close is Richard Linklater, and even his films have big “moments” of the sort rarely seen in Rohmer. Seeming forbidding at first — with a lack of obvious plot, long meandering conversations, and at times impenetrable characters — his films are actually extremely accessible for anyone looking to get into the French arthouse.
Many filmmakers are brilliant at depicting romance. From Howard Hawks tough-as-nails protagonists, to Woody Allen’s neurotic New Yorkers, to Wong Kar Wai’s impossibly romantic (and well-dressed) lovers, to the ultra-snappy couples of Nora Ephron, many filmmakers and screenwriters have made a living by constantly fleshing out the different nuances of love.
Yet, the reason Èric Rohmer stands head and shoulders above the rest is not only due to his prolific output (with over 20 features to his name) but due to the very ordinariness of his heroes.
There are no superheroes in his movies. Instead, his world is one of civil servants, receptionists, university students, layabouts, carpenters and musicians.
More specifically, relatable people you would recognize every day of your life. He starts his films with his characters; observing their habits, their profession, their likes and dislikes, the particular predicament they are in. From there he throws them into a situation that changes their understanding of love and romance that is as slyly philosophical as it is enjoyable to watch.
Reviews
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
One of the Finest movie ever made!!!
This is a complete Masterpiece by Genius David Fincher. Ohhhhh myy how good a movie can be !!. This movie made me cry. Outstanding acting, cinematography and art. Just Glorious. One of the best movie of all time.
Green Book (2018)
💯/💯 What a Wonderful Movie!
Everything is well directed and acted. It's a privilege to watch this kind of movies. Definitely one of the best movies of all time. That's why this is the best motion picture of 2018. Really this is a great one.
About Time (2013)
A Masterpiece
A movie of a lifetime. Totally loved it. Teached many lessons
Temple Grandin (2010)
One of the Greatest ❤
Ohh my god. What a great movie that is. Most inspiring movie I have ever seen. This movie taught me many lessons.. 💓
Aynabaji (2016)
Phenomenal 👌
Just awesome. excellent acting, cinematography, story., Sound track.
My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown (1989)
One of the Greatest Acting you can See!!!!
This movie is completely inspirational and it teaches us many things about life. One of the Greatest Movie By One of the Greatest Actor Daniel Day Lewis.