Sex on screen: Finding the sweet spot between US candy gloss and Euro graphic

By SYBILLA GROSS

Sex on the big screen. It can be impassioned sex, awkward sex, cold sex, licentious sex, or any type of sex really. But almost always, it’s fake sex.

Clearly there is a disjunction here – sex is as real as it gets. So what is it like trying to make something so natural seem, well, natural?

Speakers from last night’s Sex on Screen talk event hosted by the Melbourne International Film Festival and moderated by film director Bec Peniston Bird, shed some light on the challenges that actors and directors face in creating authenticity in intimacy.

• Acute Misfortune is showing tomorrow night at the Kino at 6.45pm.
• Undertow will be part of the MIFF travelling showcase, with showings in Belgrave, Wangaratta and Geelong in coming weeks. 

Tony Ayres, who directed Walking on Water (MIFF 2002), and Miranda Nation, the director of Undertow (MIFF 2018), represented the directorial side of filmmaking on the panel.

According to them, manufacturing sex scenes is up there with the hardest parts of the job. It’s astonishingly difficult to get "just right", apparently.

Between the “candy gloss” sex scenes of American films and the raw, graphic sex in European ones, Australians often cut an awkward character when it comes to our own sex scenes, according to Ayres.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however. Ayres reiterated that the art of sex is to grapple with the awkward difficulties of it, as well as the pleasures. Portraying awkwardness is pretty real.

On the acting side, Sarah Snook and Thomas M Wright (who also directed The Age Critics Award winner for this year, Acute Misfortune), were on the panel, and both talked about the practice of acting out sex. Unsurprisingly, it’s awkward too.

“Acting out sex is a strange and unsexy thing,” said Snook. It’s constantly start, stop, change, start again. Hardly a recipe for the spontaneity which the audience is led to believe has occurred on film.

The added pressure of trying to look sexy is another hurdle, one which is more unevenly pushed on to women, the panel agreed. Being comfortable with lumps and bumps on real human bodies isn’t represented very frequently, particularly in American films, but here too in Australia.

This promotion of a flawless ideal when it comes to intimacy reduces the act of sex to little more than a literal hot minute to sell the film, rather than utilise it as a powerful tool to progress the narrative – this is a shame, according to Wright.

“Sex is another form of communication … it can be revealing of people,” he said.

And perhaps this picture of "perfect" sex is best demonstrated by a lack of mess after the deed, according to Snook. Seriously, what happens to the mess?

Stylistically, some filmmakers take the "less is more" approach with sex scenes, which both the directors and actors on the panel said creates a sense of unintentional awkwardness in the narrative.

Whether we like it or not (although I’d bet that most of us do), sex is a permanent fixture in life. So why be so weirdly awkward about it on the screen?

The sequence usually plays out like this: first, paltry shots of feet, followed by surreptitious side boob grabs. Then, shots of the male’s back and the female’s face as climax approaches (or does it?), and then … well, we know what comes next, even if it’s not shown. Apart from being really formulaic, conservatively alluding to sex in such a way speaks to Wright’s point about sex being underutilised as a driver of the narrative.

And that’s the other thing, we really only ever witness the woman’s face, because sex on screen occupies a very white heterosexual male space – another item on which the whole panel agreed.

“Women’s bodies are objectified to keep people watching,” said Snook.

Wright responded to audience laughter: “You don’t see [much] dick on TV in that context, do you?”

 But jokes aside, our preoccupation with sex, and how we watch it on screen, has very real implications in the real world, according to Snook. So much of our information comes from the screen, and that puts a responsibility in the hands of filmmakers and actors to portray sex well, she said. This includes diversity on all fronts – ethnicities, sexualities, body types and disabilities.

So, what makes a good sex scene?

The reality of acting out sex scenes is that it puts the actors into a vulnerable position.

According to everyone on the panel, the more that this can be mitigated, the better the scene, especially when it comes to violent sex. A culture of respect, and a decent litany of consent forms, can help prevent uncomfortable scenarios for actors and producers alike. And yes, the actors have to get along.

In fact, beyond the theory, a lot of the event talked about these ethical intricacies and the actual mechanics of how to pull off a sex scene.

Audience member Rachel, a Deakin University student studying creative writing and drama, came to hear this input from the experienced actors on the panel.

“It’s something that’s always concerned me as an actress, especially keeping my power and protecting myself in situations like these,” she said.

“I’ve never actually done a sex scene on film, so it was something that was of interest to me to see how people approached it.”

Overall, the discussion was a deep, yet lively, insight into the nitty-gritty of sex scenes, which, according to MIFF programmer Thomas Caldwell, has an important place in this year’s festival.

“I hope MIFF is expanding people’s idea of what cinema is and what cinema can achieve… Many of our films this year, including Thomas M Wright’s film Acute Misfortune and Undertow, which Miranda Nation directed, had really interesting depictions of sex in them, so straight away, I thought this is a brilliant way of involving two of our emerging directors who are doing really good work,” he said.

Although sex scenes generally only occupy a fraction of screen time in the overall film, the orchestration of that scene may have involved the most complex planning when compared to the rest of it, in order to strike that perfect note of authenticity.  

MIFF runs until tomorrow night, Sunday, August 19.