When Whitby, Ont.-born stage actress May Irwin shared the first-ever onscreen kiss in 1896, she probably had no idea it would lead to Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs. Opening this summer in North America, the UK director’s 69-minute film is the latest in a contemporary spate of movies to flout mainstream cinema taboo with depictions of graphic, unsimulated sex. Controversy? Well, Brit mag Time Out praised 9 Songs as “a love story that is tender, exciting, credible and sometimes erotic.” The BBC’s website panned it as a “stultifying, self-conscious and flesh-creepingly repulsive lot of codswallop.” Meanwhile, London newspaper The Observer was just bored, likening it to “a rather solemn sex-education film.” Now, that’s progress.
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What X-rated movie did United Artists trumpet with a two-page ad, reprinting New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s full 4,000-word review, in which she wrote, “This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made, and so it's probably only natural that an audience, anticipating a voluptuous feast from the man who made The Conformist, and confronted with this unexpected sexuality, and the new realism it requires of the actors, should go into shock”? |
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Caligula |
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Last Tango in Paris |
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Don’t Look Now |
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Basic Instinct |
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Porky’s |
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