The movie should really be called “Fifty Shades of Foreplay,” because that’s the most important thing it has that most movies don’t. Whatever else the new “Fifty Shades” film may be, it’s 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’re sex scenes in which everything sexy is eliminated. It’s 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’m referring to the movie, not to the book, which I haven’t read—isn’t porn. It isn’t mommy porn, and it isn’t softcore porn. It isn’t a joke, and it isn’t 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 isn’t 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’d 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.
But maybe that’s exactly the point: in writing the specifics of a sex scene, in filming a scene of explicitly sexual activity, filmmakers reveal what they are imagining or fantasizing about in relation to the script, the scene, the story, the characters—and themselves. The element of self-revelation in such scenes makes the filmmakers as vulnerable as the actors. A scene in which two characters converse at a bar can be filmed in a banal way without revealing more about the director than a mere professional incompetence. But a sex scene is the great cinematic litmus test, in which the secrets of a director’s intimate life find their way to the screen. Regardless of differences between the characters and their makers, a sex scene is the closest thing to an instant X-ray of the filmmaker’s innermost fibre. (Aside: look at my list of the best films of 2014. The top three films are the work of filmmakers—Wes Anderson, Josephine Decker, Jean-Luc Godard—whose way with movie sex is utterly singular and integral to their art.)
With “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the director (Sam Taylor-Johnson), the screenwriter (Kelly Marcel), and the writer on whose book the movie is based (E. L. James) all give unstintingly of their erotic imagination. Though the results fall short of wonderful, they’re far ahead of most major commercial movies that have anything to do with love. The movie is an inside-out version of a romantic comedy, the kind that isn’t made but should be, about a couple who meet cute, have an instant spark, get together, but have to overcome an obstacle to their relationship. The obstacle isn’t their families’ ethnic differences, an inconvenient child, or disagreements about living space. Rather, the obstacle is a fundamental sexual incompatibility, which is all the more troubling because of their fundamental compatibility.
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