When critics of pop culture castigate Hollywood films for excesses in sex and violence, a regular moviegoer has to ask, What sex? American movies wrote the book on colorful carnage, and keep reprinting it. But serious--or even frivolous--pictures with an erotic touch are hard to find. And please don't mention frat-house farces like the recent hit American Pie 2, a kind of I Know Who You Did Last Summer whose real subjects are competition (with other guys) and humiliation (by women). AmPie 2 also has little redeeming priapic interest: on a warm June day, two college kids have sex--under the covers! When push comes to love, even prurient U.S. filmmakers turn into Puritans.
Are there any grownups in the movie world? Yes, in Europe, where the French have restored ooh-la-la to art-house films with the explicit depiction of sexuality. And by explicit we mean X-plicit: copulation, fellatio and other human activities, shown with a realism that is hard core or close to it. Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl, about the rivalry of two sisters, 12 and 15, features a 20-min. scene of foreplay between the 15-year-old and her would-be deflowerer. At the heart, or groin, of the Anglo-French Intimacy is a bluntly staged affair between a man and a woman who exchange no names, no life stories, only bodily fluids. Baise-moi (still playing in theaters and due out on DVD next month) is Thelma & Louise torqued up as a relentless feminist-porno melodrama. The two leads endure severe sexual abuse, then mete out revenge as a dish best served scalding hot.
The art-sex film is both new and deja-voyeur. It picks up where such landmark films as Last Tango in Paris, The Devils, In the Realm of the Senses, The Last Woman and other sizzling studies of adult sexuality seemed to be leading movies in the '70s. That's not where they went. Hollywood went for the teen-boy market, while European films retreated into a sort of catatonic minimalism. Now--or, rather, finally--directors are again dramatizing, how human beings reveal their power, vulnerability, joy and desperation in their most intimate moments.
In the U.S., "adult film" automatically means porno; sexually explicit movies and serious movies are considered two separate genres. In Europe, they provocatively coexist. In fact, the art-sex picture has blossomed so fully that it is very nearly its own genre. The past few years have seen such stark French studies as Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone, Bruno Dumont's The Life of Jesus and L'Humanite, and Breillat's Romance and A Real Young Girl (all of which have played in U.S. theaters and are available on video). These films are grim, graphic and not so much erotic as grittily naturalistic; they are closer to Emile Zola than to Emmanuelle.