Movie theaters are full, Eurodance is big: Close your eyes and it’s the 1990s again. Adding to the throwback vibe, there’s a new controversy about sex in movies. The story of a love triangle between a German film director (played by Franz Rogowski), his husband (Ben Whishaw), and an elementary school teacher (Adèle Exarchopoulos), Ira Sachs’ Passages premiered to strong reviews at Sundance but was given an NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association for its explicit sex scenes. The film’s distributor, Mubi, has opted to release it in theaters unrated, but not before a round of interviews in which Sachs called the MPA’s decision “a form of cultural censorship” and pointed to the ratings board’s long history of disproportionately stigmatizing sex, especially when it’s between same-sex partners.
Created in 1990 to replace the disreputable X, the NC-17 rating, which bars admission to anyone under the age of 17, has fallen almost completely out of use in recent years. Last fall, the Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde became the first major NC-17 release in almost a decade, and it appeared in only a handful of theaters before making its way to Netflix. In an environment where smaller, non-studio films often find their biggest audiences on streaming, ratings have come to feel increasingly less important, verging on irrelevant.
The NC-17 label has also become less important because it’s so rarely called for. Twenty-first-century cinema, particularly in the U.S., has become overwhelmingly sexless, and since violence has never much bothered the MPA, it’s left the group with precious few chances to whip out its scarlet letter. A reaction against the leering, gratuitous nudity of the 1990s, along with a more recent reckoning with the conditions under which sex scenes are shot, has combined with mainstream movies’ overriding lack of interest in everyday life to leave the movie landscape largely void of moments of physical intimacy. Tony Stark may have entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a bed-hopping bad boy, but it took 13 years and 26 movies for the MCU to feature anything close to a love scene (and given how poorly Eternals went, it seems unlikely to try it again). As RS Benedict wrote in a widely shared essay called “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny,” the “perfect bodies” in superhero movies “exist only for the purpose of inflicting violence upon others.” The biggest movie in the world, Barbie, is full of perfectly sculpted bodies, but Barbie rebuffs her boyfriend’s attempts to land so much as a kiss on the cheek, and although Ken desperately wants to sleep over at Barbie’s Dreamhouse, he has to admit he’s not sure what he’d do there. There is sex in Oppenheimer, whose hero is a habitual philanderer as well as a genius, but considering the way his little death paves the way for nuclear Armageddon, it probably would have been better if he’d kept it in his pants.
Passages, at least, is especially attentive to bodies, and not only when they’re rolling around in bed. In the opening scene, Rogowski’s Tomas is on the set of his latest film, growing increasingly incensed with the way his lead actor is walking down the stairs. First it’s the way his arms move that is wrong, then his hands, then the speed at which he enters the room, and to top it all off, there’s an extra who’s pretending to drink from an empty wineglass. That night, Tomas is celebrating the end of the shoot at a bar when his husband, Martin (Whishaw), approaches him to tell him he’s turning in for the night. The way Martin slides smoothly into sync with Tomas as he dances instantly establishes a sense of the long-standing intimacy between the two of them, while the fact that Martin is coming in close only to tell his husband he’s going home hints at where their relationship is now. As soon as Martin is out of sight, Tomas starts dancing with Agathe (Exarchopoulos), and though it isn’t love (or even lust) at first sight, you can see them sizing each other up, watching the way the other one moves. Later, in the moment before they have sex for the first time, Tomas stares at Agathe in her friend’s kitchen as she looks off into the distance, their gazes at right angles as they contemplate the inevitability of what’s about to happen.
Tomas and Agathe’s first sexual encounter is a relatively tame one—she climbs on top of him and the camera discreetly cuts away, the way movies usually do. But when she drops by the editing room where he’s cutting his new movie, the sex they have is much wilder and more intense. It’s not explicit in the way that term is usually used: She keeps her underwear on, and he’s in such a hurry he gets his pants only halfway off, exposing slightly more than he might in a Speedo. But this isn’t the kind of sex scene where two actors flail around on top of each other in short, soft-focus shots until the actress pretends to climax. Exarchopoulos and Rogowski play every moment with an almost biological specificity that makes the fact that you can’t technically see much of anything beside the point, and the way Sachs shoots the scene, in a single uncut take, lends it both urgency and a sense of realism. These are two people who already know each other inside and out, with a physical chemistry that makes other incompatibilities null and void.
The online discourse about sex scenes often focuses on whether or not they’re “necessary.” Do they advance the plot? Do they tell us something about the characters we don’t otherwise know? Or are they just there to gratify the audience’s voyeuristic urges? I’d argue that, in the case of Passages, sexual explicitness is essential to the plot. Tomas is a fuckboy par excellence, a narcissistic manipulator so devoted to his own needs he has no room to contemplate the destruction he wreaks in other people’s lives. Rogowski is a magnetic screen presence, but that’s not enough to explain why Agathe immediately falls in love with him, or why Martin has stayed with him despite the signs that the affection went out of their marriage long ago. Factor in that Tomas is great in bed, though, and it all starts to make sense. Even after Martin has kicked Tomas out of their Parisian apartment, the sex they have when they get back together—another long single take, this one with substantially more of the actors’ bodies on display (including movie nudity’s final frontier)—makes you understand why they’d be reluctant to let it go, no matter how poisoned the rest of their relationship has become.
I’d also argue, though, that “is it necessary?” isn’t the right question, or at least the only one. Part of what makes movies (and art more generally) important is that they serve as an implicit rebuke to a strictly utilitarian view of the world, the spiritual parsimony that says that the only necessary things are the ones we can’t live without. We don’t need movies the way we need food or water, but we need them to remind us that being alive is more than drawing breath.
There are other ways Sachs could have conveyed the physical attraction between his leads, ways that would not have provoked the judgment of the MPA. But even if they might have conveyed the same information, it wouldn’t have had the same effect. In order to be emotionally involved with Passages’ characters, we have to feel, not just understand, why Martin and Agathe stay with Tomas. And that, with apologies to the haters, means letting the movie turn you on. “I really wanted to make a horny film,” Sachs told the Associated Press, “a film that gave pleasure and was about pleasure.”
Receiving pleasure is a big part of why we’ve always gone to the movies, and while it’s better that we’re thinking more about whom that pleasure is intended for and under which conditions it’s produced, that doesn’t have to mean giving up on it altogether. You could have people talk about the great sex they just had, in the same way that a Mission: Impossible movie could show Tom Cruise racing toward the edge of a cliff on his motorcycle and cut away to Simon Pegg saying, “Great jump, Ethan!” But it’s kidding yourself to think that the impact would be the same, or that you’re not cutting the movies off from a vital area of human experience by requiring them to tell instead of embracing their power to show.
