Tell me about it, Stud.

 

"If you're filled with affection you're too shy to convey..."

 

Cinema can be very sexy: we are turned on by the visual. Add a compelling narrative, some characters we care about and a few delicious actors and its no wonder that people talk about sex scenes and revisit them over and over. As a child, not yet introduced to formal sex education but curious nonetheless, I used to sneak into the spare bedroom and watch late-night movies on our old tv. I saw some fairly naughty stuff in that spare room. And, even though I watched plenty of tv as a child, it is the sex scenes that have stuck with me. They gave me access to an adult world that I was not yet part of and they taught me my earliest lessons about sexuality. The films I’ve listed here are very personal. While they might not be part of any dialogue about sex you might come across elsewhere, they appeared on my screen at just the right time in my life, when I started asking questions I felt my mother wouldn’t answer for me.

Grease

Sandy arrives at the fun fair, dressed in skin-tight black trousers and smoking a cigarette. Bad girl, Sandy. “Tell me about it, stud”, she purrs.

Grease taught me that, sometimes, to get a guys attention, you have to change everything about yourself. Duly noted. 

The Lion King

As Elton John croons in the background, Nala and Simba have weird feelings. And this scene in turn gave me weird feelings. I saw The Lion King in the cinema way back in 1994. It was my cousin’s birthday party and I was the only girl who had been invited. I also had a crush on one of the guys at the party. He sat beside me in the darkness, popcorn on his spindly eight-year old knee.  I wanted to kiss him, but he was a boy and boys were icky. So I was like, WT FUCK? On the cinema screen above me, Simba and Nala played by a waterfall. The scene oozed with repressed urges and their burgeoning sexuality reflected mine. Except, they were lions and I was an 8-year-old girl. Doubly confusing.

(Disney, of course, could never give a human character these ‘come to bed’ eyes – see 2.36 minutes into the below video. I always found the anthropomorphism of Disney movies very odd. A friend of mine, and fellow film studies graduate, has had a fondness for foxes ever since she fell for Robin Hood in their 1973 version. I feel Disney have a lot to answer for.)

In short, The Lion King taught me that sometimes you don’t understand your own feelings until…well, until quite a bit later. 

Now and Then

Now And Then is a coming of age film. (No laughing please. “Coming” is not a dirty word.) It tells the story of a group of girls, on the cusp of adulthood, who spend a summer together in 1970. Christina Ricci plays Roberta, a tomboy who’s mother’s death has affected her in ways she doesn’t yet fully understand. The Wormer brothers are her mortal enemies (in that way that 12-year-old girls develop “mortal enemies.” I had one once. We fell out over a tennis match and I never spoke to her again.) Roberta kisses the eldest of the Wormer brothers in an incredibly cute scene. It turns out that underneath the bickering they were crazy about each other all along. I desperately hoped this was why the boys in school pulled my hair.

Now and Then taught me that sexual tension comes in many guises. 

Mermaids

Winona Ryder loses her virginity in the bell tower of a convent to a caretaker almost ten years older than her. As a direct result of this sequence, I’ve been obsessed with 60s eyeliner, polka dots and handsome handymen for most of my adult life. Mermaids tells the story of an awkward girl who has a turbulent relationship with her mother. In the climactic scene of the film, Charlotte (Ryder) and her younger sister Kate (Christina Ricci) get drunk on some alcohol they find in the house and then wander towards the neighboring convent. However, while the fifteen-year old Charlotte, drunk and dolled up in her mother’s make-up and negligee, loses her virginity, Kate falls into the river below and drowns/doesn’t drown. (I’m not giving anything away. Just watch it. It’s good.) 

Re-watching the film now at the grand age of 24, I can see that this scene is part of the damaging tradition of ‘if you have sex, something bad will happen to you’ narratives. Also, Joey – the handsome handyman – kinda seems a bit of a dumbass. Hindsight doesn’t count for much in this instance however: lessons from the film had already been learned and Mermaids taught me that sex can sometimes get you in a lot of trouble.  

The Dreamers

The Dreamers is ambitious, but ultimately flawed. Set in Paris in 1968, it’s a film about cinema, youth culture, politics and growing up. It also has some very sexy scenes. One sequence in particular remains etched on my memory. Matthew (Michael Pitt) loses a bet with Isabelle (Eva Green) and her brother Theo (Louis Garrel). Theo announces his forfeit: Matthew must have sex with Isabelle as Theo watches. While Matthew hesitates, Isabelle puts La Mer on the record player and performs a slow, swaying striptease. Even after the boys have left the room she remains, languidly rolling her hips and smiling to herself. Although Isabelle is the focus of our collective gaze (check this out if you want to get theoretical), I’ve always felt that Isabelle’s strip is primarily for her own pleasure. We get the impression that she does this type of thing all the time, alone in her bedroom, and the fact of her audience doesn’t make much difference to her. 

The Dreamers taught me that your body can give you a lot of pleasure and you shouldn’t be afraid of  that. 

(The scene I’m looking for isn’t on Youtube. However, I did a lot of searching and found it here for your viewing pleasure.)

The English Patient

A lot of people don’t like The English Patient because it’s long and boring and farfetched. In my case, I love it because it is long and boring and farfetched. When I discovered it, I was in my mid-teens. I wrote bad poetry, I kept a diary and I knew huge chunks of Shakespeare off by heart: in short I was a typical future English Lit student and a total pain in the arse. In The English Patient, Almásy (the patient) also keeps a notebook with scribblings. He writes, “Betrayals in war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace. New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything. For their heart is an organ of fire.” Almásy falls in love with Katherine Clifton, a married woman, and they embark on a tempestuous affair. Their guilt and their fear of “smashing everything” seeps into both the films sex scenes, so that they become volatile almost to the point of violence. The first time the couple have sex, Almásy tears Katherine’s dress off her body. The film then immediately cuts to Almásy sitting in the bath sewing the dress back together as Katherine watches him from bed. There’s something wonderful about the physicality of the first scene, quickly followed by the tenderness of the second. “When were you most happy?” Almásy asks Katherine. “Now”, she says. “And when were you least happy?” “Now”, she answers again.

The English Patient taught me that sometimes there can’t be a happy ending. (The teenage romantic in me moped, sighed and secretly relished that realisation.) 

In the following scene, the couple sneak away from a Christmas party – in the next room, Katherine’s husband, Almásy’s best friend, everyone who would soon be hurt by their betrayal. 

Threesome

You have no idea how naughty it felt to watch this, all the lights off in the spare bedroom, at 1 in the morning on a school night. Now, however, the most extreme reaction this film provokes in me is “Wouldn’t mind a bit of that.” I don’t think I need to delve too much into plot: its enough to tell you that the tagline to the movie is “One girl. Two guys. Three possibilities.” I think you get the jist. 

Threesome taught me that sexuality is a fluid thing and that sometimes, you just need to go with the flow. 

Atonement

And finally, because a clipped British accent makes any sex scene better, here is the infamous library scene from Atonement. This film wasn’t part of my childhood sexual education (it was released in 2007) but I wanted to post it anyway cause it’s haaaawt.