While sex — as in, coitus, rumpy, intercourse, balling, banging, humping, boffing, bonking, riding, ploughing, boning, porking, rutting, schtupping, shagging and obviously fucking — does feature in some shape or form with extreme frequency in cinema, it only rarely forms a central, wait for it, thrust of the story. Distributors (especially in the U.S.) often display of a streak of puritanism when it comes to sex, particularly when compared to the their much more anything-goes attitude toward violence. And who can blame, them — even today mainstream audiences can be as put off by the merest hint of the stigma of pornography as Betsy is when Travis brings her to that “dirty” movie in “Taxi Driver.” And so in some ways, the “Fifty Shades Of Grey” phenomenon is to be applauded: the books and now the film franchise have, however regressively executed, at least dragged the conversation about less conventional, non-normative sexual practices into the mainstream, and at the very least, given us an excuse to spruce up, expand and revise this feature.
On the other hand, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” is one of the worst books ever “written,” it became a less terrible but not at all good film, and this weekend we have to suffer through more lip-biting and artificially manufactured chemistry, when its sequel “Fifty Shades Darker” opens. Help us, Dakota Johnson, you’re the only one who can.
Of course you could just skip it, and doing so does not at all mean you’ll be stuck with nothing but strictly missionary, one-foot-on-the-floor movie sex. Here are 25 films, of wildly varying quality, genre, tone and level of eroticism, that all at least share a certain fearlessness when it comes to celebrating, castigating or otherwise investigating sex of the less vanilla variety.
“Nymphomaniac” (2014)
If any more proof were needed that Lars von Trier made more or less the modern standard-bearer for this list, it came when Entertainment Weekly chose the two-volume “Nymphomaniac” as their worst film of 2014 (LOL). The milder, funnier ‘Vol. 1’ (these being relative terms: it does begin with a beaten and brutalized Charlotte Gainsbourg lying under the dripping eaves in a dark alley) is the more accessible, and the easier to parse, as a breakout Stacy Martin delivers a straightforwardly female POV on sexual awakening, unembarrassed eroticism and the embrace of sexual power. ‘Vol. 2’ is harsher and darker, its humor more caustic, more acid as the sexual pleasures that Martin’s heroine pursued sour into the sexual compulsion and desire for more extreme experiences that Gainsbourg’s iteration embodies. Throughout it all, the astonishing photography and sheer filmmaking ingeniousness keeps you rapt in attention even when the behavior onscreen is repellent or disturbing. All told, for five hours and twenty-three minutes of its five hour twenty-five minute total uncut runtime this sexual odyssey is perilously close to a masterpiece — it’s only the unnecessary and deeply divisive final couple of minutes that represent Von Trier’s ambitions finally overshooting even his extraordinary skill. Still, aside from that final turn of the screw that feels so unearned, and so vastly contrary to everything else he’d been saying, this vast sexual smorgasbord of a movie is probably the 21st century’s best film about fucking. [A-/B+]
“Fifty Shades of Grey” (2014)
Fun Fact: “Fifty Shades of Grey” premiered at the 2014 Berlinale, the same year that Kenneth Branagh‘s live action “Cinderella” did. Even funner fact: the Disney princess movie is probably the edgier of the two. And the comparison is anything but spurious, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” based on the publishing phenomenon that was EL James‘ collection of nonsense sentences masquerading as a “book” might supposedly be about a young woman’s induction into a BDSM lifestyle, but actually it’s as sappy a story of a trembling virginal ingenue being rescued from her peasant life by a rich and handsome prince as any Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. Directed with dutiful polish by Sam Taylor-Johnson‘s and benefitting from a performance from Dakota Johnson that is so much better than this dross deserves, there’s only so much anyone could’ve done with this stinker of a franchise, and unfortunately the regressive gender politics and the fawning, tone-deaf Randian adoration of Expensive Stuff remain. But, hey, why are we so down on it, it’s just “Twilight” fan fiction with added kink, right? Well, wrong, because even the kink is utterly, utterly lame, and the sex scenes, as we wrote about here, are almost the diametric opposite of transgressive, especially as they take place between two people who almost palpably loathe each other in real life. And not in a sexy way. [D]
“The Night Porter” (1974)
Taste is a questionable concept when discussing movies about sex: one person’s deviance is another person’s delight and making such judgments can be perilous. But even the most broadminded among us have to admit that Liliana Caviani‘s provocative and disturbing film walks the line of outright bad taste, and occasionally wobbles over. If anything, it’s the streak of odd sentimentality that makes its rape-fantasy/Nazism/sadomasochism storyline so difficult to stomach. Set in a Viennese hotel run by, and mostly for, ex-Nazis who are one step away from war crimes trials, it details the fallout when Charlotte Rampling‘s survivor encounters Dirk Bogarde‘s former SS officer and with her as a willing partner, he resumes the sexual abuse he’d visited on her in the concentration camp. There are incredibly difficult and thorny questions of guilt, sexual domination and power-play brought up even by the premise, but the film mostly elects not to confront them directly, instead backgrounding the moral implications of using one’s own suffering, and less forgivably, that of millions of others, as fuel for erotic fulfillment. Bogarde, and an iconic Rampling especially, are both totally committed, and Caviani’s flashback-heavy style has a certain lush, doomy beauty, but the film is a quagmire: it’s said those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but what happens to those who wilfully repeat it, night after night? [B-]
“Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” (1975)
Almost certainly the most “extreme” film on this list, Pasolini‘s “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” is easy to hate for its intricate, extensive, apparently uncomplicated depiction of relentless sexual depravity and cruelty, and no-one can be blamed for turning it off halfway through. But this—the last film Pasolini completed before his murder and one which ever since its 1975 release has been frequently condemned, cut and outright banned—has much more to it than pointless nastiness. An adaptation of a book by the man who gave his name to sadism was never going to get made into a ride at Disneyland, and the Marquis de Sade‘s book “The 120 Days of Sodom” is literally a meticulous list of taboo acts of sex and violence, with an extremely thin framing device that’s abandoned halfway through. But Pasolini creates from it a film that’s less about sex than it is about power and its exercise. It’s not even really about fascism—the quartet of abusers could belong to almost any time or place and have no agenda beyond their own pleasure—and nor is it an examination of psychology: rather, “Salò” is about the way in which power becomes an end in itself, and one that we all desire, and its message is thus all the more horrifying in its universality. We still don’t blame you if you want to watch something else instead, though. [B+]
“Crash” (1996)
“Like a porno movie made by a computer… in a mistaken algorithm” is how Roger Ebert memorably described David Cronenberg’s adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel about auto crash paraphiliacs. And he meant that in a good way—”Crash” may be one of the most all-time perfect marriages of the aesthetic and thematic approach of a particular director with the philosophy and mood of his source material. Starring, for the third time on this list, that kinkster James Spader, along with Holly Hunter, Deborah Unger, Rosanna Arquette and Elias Koteas, the film is really remarkable, though more for the cerebral sterility of its execution as, once again, body-horror expert Cronenberg manages to engage the brain and turn the stomach while bypassing the heart entirely. It’s a truly fascinating, brilliant film, deeply upsetting and prescient in what it suggests about our relationship with technology and how it might be in the process of breaking down our ability to connect with one another as humans. Of course, at the time it sparked outrage and a few bans (though also won the Special Jury Prize in Cannes), for its unadorned portrayal of the particular fetish of being sexually aroused by car crashes (and surely for the scene in which Spader fucks Arquette’s leg wound in particular), and yet it is an extraordinarily bloodless affair, cool and metallic to the touch; we can only wonder how splashily sensationalist it might have become in hands less surgical than Cronenberg’s. Thankfully, this is the version we got, and as provocative, grown-up fare, it’s essential. [A]