Sexy Times
Everything I needed to learn about life I got from ‘Star Trek’. It makes sense that we’d head to the movies for sex, right?
Think fast: what’s the sexiest scene you ever saw in a film? Was it the benchmark-setting beach make-out in 1953’s From Here to Eternity? Ellen Barkin’s fully clothed freak-out while Dennis Quaid did… something off screen and grining all the way in 1987’s The Big Easy? Maybe Brigitte Lin’s utter bliss at Lesley Cheung doing… something off screen under the water in The Bride With White Hair? Better still, did you learn anything at all from Tiffany Haddish’s grapefruit demo in 2017’s Girl’s Trip?
Admittedly those examples lean to the fluffy side, but there’s a kernel of truth to the idea that art plays a part in creating culture; it wouldn’t be persecuted if it didn’t. One of the great criticisms of rom-coms is of the way they perpetuate outdated, heteronormative ideas of romantic relationships, how they form and what they should look like. Look no further than Vito Russo’s landmark The Celluloid Closet for an examination of the impact of films on our collective perception of the LGBTQ+ community for too long. To that end, kind of, MOViE MOViE has teamed up with the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Comparative Literature and a couple of others for MOViE MOViE: Let’s Talk About Sex 2024. The series of just five films was curated to be one of films that “break all the taboos surrounding sex, encourage frank and open discussions about sex, and deconstruct sex from academic and cultural perspectives.”
Recognition of the fluidity and diversity of gender identity and personal sexuality is at an all time high, something even the deepest of resistant basement dwellers will admit, and first time filmmaker/cinematographer Molly Manning Walker explores what that feels like for young adults in How to Have Sex. The film won writer-director Manning Walker the Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Award in 2023, and though it gives off sensational Euphoria vibes, in reality it’s an unsentimental coming-of-age story, free of coming-of-age clichés, where the main characters actually grow up. Teenaged besties Tara, Em and Skye spend their last vacation together in Greece on what they expect will be a weekend bacchanal. Manning Walker paints a club-vibe hot girl summer adventure on the surface, beneath which she dives into thorny territory that these young women – played flawlessly by Mia McKenna-Bruce (Vampire Academy), Enva Lewis and Lara Peake – will be compelled to deal with for the rest of their lives, and the shame, guilt and rage that comes with it.
The word grooming has been thrown around in the media a great deal lately, and for the most part many of us are still struggling with a precise definition. Not so Czech documentarians Barbora Chalupová and Vít Klusák, whose 2020 doc Caught in the Net chronicles a 10-day experiment looking at how easy it is for predators to find, groom and blackmail girls on social media sites like Facebook. Chalupová and Klusák hired three preternaturally youthful actresses, each over 18, built bedroom sets and set up chat-ready accounts as 12-year-olds and let the cameras roll. The experiment ends roughly 2,400 sexual predators later. Is it entrapment? Is it ethical? (Stanford University may have an opinion on that.) Whatever it is, it’s as fascinating as it is disturbing, and 100% nightmare fuel for parents. To their credit, Chalupová and Klusák don’t demonise the technology while pointing out how open a window it is into dangerous territory.
Anissa Bonnefont ventures into the world of sex work in La Maison (2022, top), based on writer Emma Becker’s 2019 autofiction. Emma (Ana Girardot) is a twentysomething Frenchwoman in Berlin, who in an effort to write her next book about sex workers actually takes up a job at a local brothel. It’s in this somewhat hermetically sealed lab that she can study the profession at its rawest, as well as acknowledge her own buried desires. As a film, Bonnefont also asks questions about how we commodify sex, lingering power dynamics and the persistence of sisterhood in a (still) female-dominated industry.
The mini-festival is rounded out with a restored version of Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 groundbreaker, In the Realm of the Senses, starring Tatsuya Fuji – who’s still working, most recently in 2023 – and Eiko Matsuda – who rarely worked again before retiring in 1982 and passing away in 2011 – as Kichizo and Sada, a lord and servant in pre-Second World War Japan who get into an extreme sexual relationship. Based on the true story of a former prostitute who murdered her lover, the film was co-produced by pinku eiga titan Koji Wakamatsu, won Oshima an award at Cannes and got. banned just about everywhere upon release. Now, it’s considered one of the greatest cinematic explorations of desire and obsession, power, taboo and psychosexual tales of all time.
Finally, Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan’s hard to find 1996 documentary Yang Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema, makes a nice companion piece to Russo’s book and remains a milestone exploration of the subject from a Chinese perspective. Produced for the British Film Institute’s Century of Cinema doc series, Kwan uses film clips and interviews with heavyweights like Tsui Hark, Ang Lee and Leslie Cheung to recontextualise the national cinema, and argue that it has consistently challenged gender norms. Whether it still does so is the question of the day, and Kwan will be on hand to discuss the film and the subject on June 23.
Letl’s Talk About Sex 2024
Where: MOViE MOViE Cityplaza; MOViE MOViE Pacific Place, Broadway Cinematheque; Premiere Elements
Hours: June 21 to July 7, 2024
Closed: N/A
Details: Tickets on sale now. For more details hit MOViE MOViE