CINEMA: William Pretorius
SEX happens — but mainly outside America, to judge from the featherweight romantic comedy Only You and the Australian sex-pic Sirens, on circuit today. They’re both about sex, love and all that, but while the Australian film celebrates sexuality, American movies, it seems, are toning things down.
The glimpse of Bruce Willis’ willy in Color of Night was apparently only for overseas, not American, consumption. And poor Anne Rice — her exuberant Interview with the Vampire became a dark, dreary ramble, while Tom Cruise turned the evil, glittering Lestat into a sexless gore- monger.
Rice’s hardcore S&M novel, Exit from Eden, about a dominatrix who’s into sexual power, doesn’t fare much better. Director Gary Marshall has turned the movie, which opens in April, into a comedy. “It’s okay to have these fantasies,” he thinks, but the sex is now illusion, foreplay — fanciful, not corporeal. The movie could now play the Bible Belt.
Exit from Eden, the movie, has undercover policemen running around the disciplinary paradise to reassure audiences that law and order are maintained. Sirens, in which the wife (Tara Fitzgerald) of a parson (Hugh Grant) discovers a sexual paradise, has good, old-fashioned snakes slithering happily around.
Overseas reviewers thought Sirens was ludicrous. It is, if you expect explicit sex and nudity to have a purpose. The movie wanders limpidly through its sexuality, setting up oppositions between puritanism and hedonism. Looking is encouraged: the characters spy on one another, on naked women bathing, a man preparing to masturbate. The minister’s wife dreams she’s naked in church. The camera is a voyeuristic eye, but an eye that is easy to please.
This is probably very subversive. Sexual affairs in some current American movies like Sleepless in Seattle and Only You have become safe, self-reflexive romances. Sleepless in Seattle’s reference was An Affair to Remember, now refilmed with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening; Only You draws on Roman Holiday in which American Gregory Peck romanced a princess (Audrey Hepburn).
But in Roman Holiday, love broke down continental barriers. In Only You, barriers are maintained as Faith (Marisa Tomei) heads to Italy in search of a Mr Right she thinks is called Damon Bradley.
This is a film about self-centred Americans abroad. Italy and its sensuality are lost on them. Sex is a joke. When Faith finds Damon, he’s Billy Zane in a wig.
The saddest thing, though, is that Ingmar Bergman’s cameraman, Sven Nykvist, has turned in the dullest- looking film of his career. But perhaps that’s fitting: the film is puritanical, and turns the theme of sexual obsession into a light travelogue — paradise for the characters is really tourism.
There are no snakes here. There couldn’t be. If the characters in this film saw one, they’d either kill it, or run like hell in the opposite direction.