This year’s Venice Film Festival program wasn’t just the most glamorous in recent history, it was also the sexiest. Literally and figuratively. Aside from the brutal heatwave that plagued festival-goers, the lineup was packed with sexually charged films, from Nicole Kidman’s Baby Girl to Luca Guadagnino’s Queer starring Daniel Craig. Elsewhere on the festival circuit, Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle opens San Sebastian, while Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, which opened in Cannes, is screening at nearly every major festival this fall.
But like Nicole Kidman's character in “Baby Girl,” who only gets aroused when something is at stake, porn in 2024 is no longer just made for entertainment as it once was; it exists to push boundaries and break clichés that revolve primarily around female and gay heroes.
“Babygirl,” by Dutch director Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies), explores the complexities of female sexuality and the issue of consent that resonates in the post-#Metoo era; while “Queer,” starring Craig and Drew Starkey, challenges preconceived notions about homosexuality, masculinity and self-acceptance.
Kidman, who has previously given memorable performances in sexually charged films such as “Eyes Wide Shut” and “The Newspaper Boy,” said at the film’s press conference in Venice that Raine’s “female gaze” guided her to tell a story that was “liberating for women,” and that it touches on many themes, including “marriage, truth, power, and consent.”
In “Baby Girl,” she plays a high-powered executive who puts her job and perfect family on the line when she engages in a torrid affair with an intern (Harry Dickinson), who exploits her darkest fantasies.
“It was told by a woman through her eyes – Halina [Reijn] “I wrote it and directed it — that’s what made it unique for me because suddenly I was going to be in the hands of a woman with this material,” Kidman said at the press conference. “It was so dear to our shared instincts and so liberating.”
As Venice programmer Alberto Barbera pointed out in an interview with diverseThe story of “Baby Girl” underscores the cultural shift and gender power dynamics that have been in place since the start of the #MeToo movement in 2007. “This same subject — a woman and a man in a work environment — would have ended very differently 20 or 30 years ago,” Barbera says, adding that the female character “would have been punished” for her “illegitimate behavior.”
The film also deals with adultery, a topic that has traditionally been treated from a male perspective that portrays female characters as either saints or dangerous, lustful women, with notorious examples such as the popular thriller Fatal Attraction starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close. In Babygirl, the person threatening the saints' family is a younger man.
Meanwhile, “Queer,” an adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel, stars Craig as William Lee, an American immigrant in Mexico in the 1950s who falls in love with a younger man (Drew Starkey) who is believed to be straight. In the film, Craig admits that he once struggled with his homosexuality bias before coming out, and hints that Eugene may be suppressing his true desires to conform to social expectations. Unlike the erotic “Call Me By Your Name,” “Queer” contains some explicit sex scenes that Craig said he and Starkey “wanted to make as (…) poignant and real and natural as possible.”
“The puritanism and all that has been very strong in the last few years,” says Guadagnino, who has been instrumental in the porn revival of recent decades with “Call Me By Your Name” and “Challengers.” “The idea of representation — and at the same time the idea of what is possible and what is not — has been very much debated,” he says. Still, Guadagnino says he doesn’t think “eroticism has left cinema because good cinema is always erotic.”
But the truth is that porn, which filled movie theaters in the 1990s, has become increasingly rare in the decades since, especially in Hollywood. And as with most decisions that govern the movie industry, it’s all about profitability.
Karina Longworth, film historian and creator of the podcast You Should Remember This, links the Hollywood porn boom of the 1980s and early 1990s to a form of imitation as flattery.
“[In Hollywood] It's common to say that it worked in the past, so it will work again. That's why when you have movies like [1987’s] “'Fatal Attraction' started making money, and I basically had a wave of movies over the course of five or six years that were a version of that movie.”
In the wake of Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction, star Michael Douglas became inextricably linked with the genre, leading subsequent hits such as Barry Levinson's Disclosure and co-starring Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct, which grossed $352.9 million worldwide and became the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1992. But many of these efforts did not reach the same heights.
Verhoeven's “Showgirls” is the best “example of trying to replicate that success.” [of ‘Basic Instinct’] “It fails,” says Longworth, who has devoted an entire series of her podcast to porn from the 1980s and ’90s.
“Showgirls lost a lot of money, but it also became an instant joke. Eyes Wide Shut was similar. There was a lot of speculation about what this movie was going to be before anyone saw it, and no one had even seen it right before it came out,” Longworth said. “People were disappointed, and they couldn’t see it clearly because it was so different from what they expected. So a lot of money was spent on it, and it didn’t make its money back.
“In an environment where people do things primarily for the money, you need to reach as many people as possible, so it makes sense to stay away from something like this,” she says.
The increasing proliferation of adult content available on the Internet over the past thirty years has also made it less likely that pornographic films will be shown in theaters.
There's this sense of division, where [depictions of sex] “They're things you can watch at home in privacy or with your partner,” Longworth says.
Even today, while streaming services have opened up additional revenue opportunities for pornographic films, distributors who prefer theatrical release have become wary of acquiring films with significant sexual content.
Distributors like Dylan Lehner at Sony Pictures Classics tend to assume that these films are rarely made for theaters because “people prefer to watch them at home.” There are exceptions with big hits like Sam Taylor-Johnson’s “Fifty Shades of Grey,” but Lehner says it was based on a best-selling book and thus had a “built-in audience.” Sony Pictures Classics bought Verhoeven’s revenge thriller “Elle” from Cannes in 2017, and while the film earned an Oscar nomination for its star Isabelle Huppert among a string of awards, it performed modestly in theaters (grossing $12.4 million worldwide).
There’s also the assumption that porn isn’t made for a “collective experience,” an idea that Frederic Boyer, artistic director of the Les Arcs and Tribeca film festivals, debunks. Boyer says he screened Reijn’s subversive 2019 film “Instinct,” starring Carice van Houten, at the Les Arcs film festival and it proved to be a highlight of the selection. “People really loved it and walked out of the theater happy,” says Boyer. “It was an unforgettable screening.”
Another obvious factor that has worked against pornography is directors' fear of portraying sex inappropriately or mishandling sex scenes in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
A famous example of a director who raised many questions is Abdellatif Kechiche, who directed the gay romance Blue is the Warmest Colour and was accused by Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos of mishandling a sex scene that took ten days to shoot and was essentially improvised. His “male gaze” was also criticised.
But none of these challenges and pitfalls have stopped established male directors from making pornographic films in Europe, such as Verhoeven with “Elle” and “Benedetta”; Lars von Trier with “Nymphomaniac” and “The Antichrist”; Gaspar Noé with “Love” and “Irreversible,” among others. (It is interesting to note that all of these films, including Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color,” premiered at Cannes.) But younger filmmakers like Rens and Audrey Diwan, and thought-provoking gay directors like Guadagnino and Guiraudie, seem to be leading the way, making films that appeal to a younger generation of audiences. Guiraudie’s most famous film, “Stranger by the Lake,” was the first to be screened at Cannes in 2013, with explicit scenes and an exploration of same-sex desire. Guiraudie says the film resonated so widely because “it’s about a kind of universality that is intimate.” Although it features gay characters, the film is about desire and death, “things that matter to everyone.”
But in an industry still dominated by men, female directors who approach eroticism in unconventional ways still face challenges. Dewan, who will present “Emmanuelle,” based on Emmanuelle Arsan’s acclaimed erotic novel of the same name, on the opening night of the San Sebastian Film Festival, says she faced some “hesitation” about the project.
The film tells the story of a woman searching for lost pleasure, and is designed as an exploration of pleasure, not a film that satisfies a male fantasy like Emmanuelle's previous films.
“I wanted to put forward the idea of a woman today, I feel, not a young girl, but a 35-year-old woman, and explore her pursuits,” says Diwan, but that approach was “annoying to some people.” She says she received “wonderful support from producers and from Baté in France,” but “there was a battle with the industry,” says Diwan. “There’s the question of pleasure on screen, and then there’s also something about women’s pleasure.”
“Dewan may have irritated some people because before her project, all of Emmanuelle’s films were made by male directors for a predominantly male audience, so they all feature a male gaze in describing the sensuality and unbridled sexuality of women,” says Manlio Gomarasca, a film producer and editor of film magazine Nocturno Cinema.
Ultimately, Diwan is part of a new generation of female directors who represent sex, sensuality, and intimacy against the backdrop of the MeToo movement.
Citing Coralie Farguet’s “Material” and Noemie Merlant’s “Balconies,” Gumaraska says the two films underscore the fact that the exploitation of the female nude in France these days is only at its peak in films directed by women. And erotic films by women often have political dimensions.
Despite concerns and doubts about profitability, some distributors are embracing the more daring films, as long as they come with top-tier directors and/or A-list actors. In Venice, for example, A24, which will release “Baby Girl” on Christmas, picked up “Queer” ahead of its world premiere.
“I think the market is ready for all this,” says Matteo Roveri, who directed the Netflix series “Supersex” and presented “Diva Futura” in competition at the Venice Film Festival.
The resurgence of pornography sees the film industry “trying to maintain the freshness of its story, the uniqueness of its approach, and the continued ability to create art by speaking to audiences in a completely new language,” says Roveri, who explores the Rome porn studio run by businessman Riccardo Schicchi during the 1980s in “Diva Futura.”
Giraudi predicts that the “question of intimacy” in cinema will be co-opted by mainstream cinema, not only in Europe but also in Hollywood, because “we live in an increasingly individualistic and increasingly self-centered world.”
“Artists have new areas to explore, and the same goes for the market. I don’t know if [mainstream cinema] “Marvel movies are going to be around for a long time,” says Giraudie. “There’s a lot of remakes and over-exploitation of sequels and prequels. So I think the market also needs to find other sources of excitement. And eroticism is one of them.”
