The movie should really be called Fifty Shades of Foreplay because thats the most important thing it has that most movies do not. Whatever else the new Fifty Shades film may be its a salutary corrective to the depiction of sex in most modern movies whether Hollywood independent or foreign. The silliest cinematic convention of recent decades has been the emblematic sex scene the visual evidence to prove to viewers that the couple in question consummate their relationship and enjoy it. These scenes merely illustrate a line in a script They have sex and might as well be done with stock footage and the actors faces digitally added.
The perfunctory sex scene is a problem of romantic comedy and of serious drama alike. Usually it involves a cut from a couple at a restaurant or in a car to the two of them pneumatically heaving in bed or pounding unseen flesh while still mostly dressed and standing in a vestibule or a kitchen or a hotel room. The scene elides the stages of erotic progress from the restaurant to the car to the door from the first kiss and the aroused gropes to the subtleties of tender empathy and intimate knowledge that make the difference in any encounter. In short they are sex scenes in which everything sexy is eliminated. Its not that the good stuff was left on the cutting-room floor; it was never filmed, or mentioned in the script or imagined by the director and screenwriter.
Fifty Shades of Grey and I am referring to the movie not to the book which I have not read is not porn. It is not mommy porn and it is not softcore porn. It is not a joke and it is not complete junk. The movie is far from a masterwork but the glossy fantasies of Fifty Shades deliver something altogether significant substantial and welcome. The trouble with the sex in most movies is not a matter of prudery but of a stultifying failure of erotic imagination and of dramatic imagination. It reflects an inability to think of sex as action and to think of characters as actual sexual beings with the sexual complexity of any ordinary person. You would think that whoever writes such ignorant gaps into a script or whoever films such gaps has never actually had sex or worse had never even fantasized about it.
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