Jeffrey M. Anderson's 400 Screens, 400 Blows - Sex, Guys and Narrow Escapes

In my rave review of Sarah Polley's remarkable new film Away from Her, I predicted its quick and painless death. The twin subjects of old age and disease rarely strike any kind of fire at the box office, especially with a lack of compensating younger characters. But I'm very happy today to be proven wrong. Playing on just 256 screens, Away from Her very nearly cracked this week's box office top ten, coming it at #12 in a week loaded with "Part III" blockbusters. (For comparison, the number one movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, is playing on 4362 screens).

Polley's movie also broaches the issue of sex; there's an unspoken tension between husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and wife Fiona (Julie Christie) over some affairs Grant apparently had with his female students back in the free-love hippie era. Grant feels gnawing doubt and confusion after Fiona checks into the home and befriends a male patient, Aubrey (Michael Murphy). And finally, Grant has a new affair with Aubrey's wife Marian (Olympia Dukakis), based on loneliness and on the sheer fact that their spouses don't really remember them anymore.

Rarely has sex been so complicated and so openly portrayed onscreen (without much nudity). Hollywood films tend to shy away from sex, and the films that dare to take on sex as a subject usually arrive with a kind of hushed, notorious feeling, such as Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls (1995), David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-moi (2001) or Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs (2004). Sex becomes more acceptable if it's bundled in a package that people can laugh at and therefore shrug off, such as the pie scene in American Pie (1999) or the nude chasing/wrestling scene in Borat (2006). The only other choice is to present sex in such a polite, refined way that it more closely resembles a postcard than anything flesh-and-blood (i.e. Brokeback Mountain).

Sex is conspicuously missing from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse (175 screens) -- conspicuous since sex was such an essential part of the original grind house experience. There were Russ Meyer's bodacious beauties, Pam Grier dressing up (and dressing down) as a hooker in Coffy (1973) and Sylvia Kristel trying all types of things in Emmanuelle (1974). Porn star Marilyn Chambers appeared in David Cronenberg's Rabid (1977), Tawny Kitaen cavorted through the jungle in The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak (1984), and lots of people, from Linda Blair and Sybil Danning to Erica Gavin and Pam Grier appeared in a series of women-in-prison films. Even horror films of the time (from Twitch of the Death Nerve to Halloween) came with their own gratuitous nudity.

Rodriguez offers up a funny sex scene in Planet Terror, one that strikes a different tone than the rest of the film. It's choppy and full of cheesy dissolves and even cheesier music. Some grind house historians claim that randy projectionists would sometimes snip out a frame or two from a favorite sex scene as a keepsake, and no doubt Rodriguez took that into account. But his sex scene as shown is laughable and elicits titters from the audience rather than its intended effect. Tarantino, of course, fills his Death Proof with beautiful (almost comic book) images of women, but very little sex. One supposed sex scene takes place during his too-short "missing reel" and a couple of hopeful guys are excluded from a girls' weekend at the lake house.

Many critics argue that Tarantino and Rodriguez are both too juvenile to actually deal with human sexuality. That may or may not be the case; Rodriguez has never had anything even close to an adult relationship in his movies, but Tarantino has. Witness the wonderful bedroom dialogue between Bruce Willis and Maria de Medeiros in Pulp Fiction (1994) or the comfortable, grown-up, get-to-know-ya chit-chat between Pam Grier and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown (1997). These scenes didn't really lead to any nookie, but they proved that Tarantino's head sometimes poked out from behind the clouds. (Or it could be that his collaborators, Roger Avary and/or Elmore Leonard, had something to do with them.)

Certainly the current cinematic environment doesn't encourage sex. For all its violence, Grindhouse received mixed reviews and tepid box office scores (not to mention some very high internet scores), but no one really made much of a fuss about it. If sex had been more prevalent, you can bet there would have been a great deal more hullabaloo. The attitude toward the film would have been more hushed and awed, like an adolescent discovering his first copy of Playboy. The fact is that movies are made by grown-ups; we need to move the national attitude toward sex out of the sixth grade and into post-graduate studies.

Ironically, the potty-mouthed comic Chris Rock has directed one of the year's most mature American movies, the misunderstood I Think I Love My Wife (3 screens). It's no work of genius, and it teeters uneasily between pleasing the audience and staying true to its ideals, but it enters into a complex web of animal attraction and loyalty, and a battle of head vs. loins with no easy answers. That movie failed financially, but the fact that it was made and the fact that Away from Her is doing so well are steps in the right direction.