Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Erotic Films Seduce Venice

Venice has got its sexy back. Erotica of all varieties — gay, straight, kinky and theoretical — is on glorious display at this year’s Venice Film Festival, with plenty of sizzling action onscreen and little of it gratuitous.

Two of the, em, hottest festival titles this year — Halina Reijn’s Babygirl and the TV series Disclaimer from Alfonso Cuarón — open with orgasms. Babygirl also climaxes to a close, with star Nicole Kidman, playing a tech manager who discovers a taste for BDSM, in a state of near or total undress throughout much of the movie.

Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ autobiographical novel, and the latest from Challengers and Call Me by Your Name filmmaker Luca Guadagnino — a director apparently on a one-man mission to bring back sexy cinema — stars Daniel Craig as a drug-addicted American expat in Mexico, circa 1950, who begins to obsess over, and pursue, a younger, bi-curious navy sailor, played by Drew Starkey.

Italian feature Diva Futura by Giulia Louise Steigerwalt explores the legendary Italian porn studio set by Riccardo Schicchi, which launched the careers of XXX stars like Cicciolina, Moana Pozzi and Éva Henger. And Love by Norwegian helmer Dag Johan Haugerud, the second in the director’s Sex/Love/Dreams trilogy, is a verbally explicit, if never visually graphic, exploration of the contrast between the sex we have, or want, and the sex society expects us to have and enjoy.

“As a consumer, sometimes I just want to see a hot movie, a sexy movie,” Reijn told The Hollywood Reporter, explaining the explicit scenes in Babygirl, which include lots of oral, digital and verbal stimulation, “with hot people in scenes that turn me on a little bit.”

Adds Starkey: “Yeah, it looks like the festival is pretty steamy this year. I’m pretty excited for that.”

But while there is plenty of hot and heavy action onscreen, the sex on display on the Lido this year is markedly different from the erotic movies of past decades. The goal isn’t, as it was in the ’70s (think Last Tango in Paris, The Night Porter or Don’t Look Now) to shock conservative viewers and break taboos. Pornhub launched in 2007. We can assume all sexual taboos are now fully and completely smashed. Nor are these new sexy movies a repeat of the erotic thriller wave of the late ’80s and early ’90s, the era of Dressed to Kill, Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction or Body of Evidence, where there was a blending of sensual titillation and sexual menace, and you could be sure the horny leading ladies would get their comeuppance in the final reel.

The goal of the new hot and heavy cinema is more therapeutic. Babygirl teases with the elements of the ’90s erotic thriller. Nicole Kidman plays a high-powered CEO unsatisfied by her marital sex with hot hubby Antonio Banderas who seeks satisfaction in a sado-masochistic relationship with her young intern, played by Harris Dickinson, putting her career and family at risk.

“I was incredibly inspired by all the sexual thrillers of the ’90s: Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, 9 1/2 Weeks, Indecent Proposal,” notes Reijn. “This film is in conversation with them. But this is my answer, my female answer, to those movies.”

Reijn takes the Fatal Attraction plot and gives it a sex-positive, feminist spin. The result is an erotic holiday thriller for the whole family.

Cuarón’s Disclaimer, despite its many steamy scenes — one, involving hot MILF Catherine (Leila George) seducing the student Jonathan (Louis Partridge) at an Italian beach resort feels, in the words of THR‘s review, straight out of Penthouse Forum — the purpose is not mere arousal. In his Rashomon-style mystery, Cuarón’s true goal in tapping these erotic tropes is very different from what one might initially expect, and one that is not revealed until the final episode of the seven-part series.

With Queer, too, Guadagnino shows us plenty of skin and does not hold back in the depiction of the attraction between Lee (Craig) and Allerton (Starkey), the man he becomes erotically obsessed with. But the sex in Queer is less about sensual satisfaction than a corrosive drive for connection and intimacy that Lee finds impossible to achieve.

“We are talking about love between men in the 1950s where there was no real language available to them to describe it, to define themselves,” says Starkley.

Similarly, the two explicit sex scenes in Bradley Corbet’s The Brutalist — this year’s frontrunner for Venice’s Golden Lion — have zero erotic charge and are instead used to reveal the nature of the trauma experienced by Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) and his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who have fled Europe after World War II to try and start a new life in America.

Perhaps the most radical use of screen sex on display in Venice this year is Love, the second in a trilogy on sexual behavior and social norms from Norwegian author and director Dag Johan Haugerud. It’s a movie filled with sex talk — the characters spend virtually all of their time discussing, in intimate, often medical detail, the sort of sex they have, the kind of sex they want and what they worry that says about them — but there is not a single depiction of actual sex onscreen.

“I find it hard to watch sex scenes in films because I question the function of it,” says Haugerud. “People have sex in different ways and you can’t ask [the actors] to bring his or her sexual experience to the shooting because that’s so private, so they always tend to have what you would call ‘film sex,’ it’s sex that doesn’t feel very truthful or realistic.”

The goal with his new trilogy — the first film, Sex, premiered to acclaim in Berlin, the third, Dreams, goes out later this year — was, Haugerud says, to make films “about sex without showing sex but by getting the actors to be as concrete and direct as possible when talking about sex.”

The conversations in Haugerud’s trilogy are not seductive nor dangerous. His characters speak plainly, and empathetically about the most intimate aspect of their lives without fear of judgment or condemnation. The films’ radical approach is to treat sexuality pragmatically, as an important, significant part of all our lives that deserves careful, serious attention. Let’s talk about sex, baby, but there’s no need to get worked up about it.

“It has a touch of the idealistic, or utopian, about it, but I don’t think this is unrealistic,” says Haugerund. “As a director I want us to reflect on these issues and, with my films, present an image of the kind of society where these kinds of conversations can happen. It is possible.”