Rick’s Reel Recommendations | 3 Films on Sex
COLUMN | ISSUE ELEVEN | MAHIMAHI / SEX
Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai on IG & Letterboxd | Columnist
Toute Une Nuit (Chantal Akerman, 1982)
Belgian pioneer of avant-garde film, Chantal Akerman, left behind a legacy of stillness in both domestic (kitchens and bedrooms) and transitory (train platforms and corridors) spaces, with critics' appeal commonly bestowed on her career centrepiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). And yet I find that even this simmering three-hour behemoth about a middle-aged widow’s precise routine of peeling potatoes and dispassionate sex tends to overshadow her surprising range as a tone poet. When finding the reference points for Akerman’s erotic purview, it is tempting to start at the literal “beast with two backs” at the “climax” of Je Tu Il Elle (1974) and end at the butt massage in The Meetings of Anna (1978). And fair enough—they’re all frickin’ depressing. But flicker over to the ’80s, and you find an elliptical masterpiece—my personal favourite of hers I’ve seen—titled Toute Une Nuit, or One Whole Night. It is yearning for connection but dormant with erotic charge, chaining together a flutter of different scenes where city folk lie awake in their beds on a hot summer night. Then, we see them venture out into the night in the hopes of meeting somebody. Couples meet, sharing a drink, then spilling the glass, hugging in the yard, slow dancing, yapping on the phone, running off together… but it is never the actual sex we see, simply the moments before they leave. The effect is like an ongoing cycle of tension building and never paying off, averaging all this potential energy out into a yearning thrum dissipated into shadows.
Rouge (Stanley Kwan, 1987)
Trust me, I would’ve liked to write about In the Mood for Love (2000), but recommending two films ostensibly “about sex” which feature zero actual sex scenes might be outright ridiculous stereotyping from a student magazine written predominantly by Gen Z contributors. So instead I defer to you another rich, haunting classic of Hong Kong cinema—one with its own secrets to hide. Rouge, based on a novel by the great Lilian Lee, is a ghost story in which one modern couple working at a newspaper office (circa ‘87), Yuen and Chor, become haunted by the tragic romance of a courtesan and playboy from fifty years ago, Fleur and Chan. Fleur drifts in her cheongsam through the urban gridlock of a very different Hong Kong, looking to place an ad for her missing love. Fleur’s origins in a troubled era of class divide, child trafficking and opium haze never impeded her longing for true love amid the high-class teahouses of the 1930s, and she fell head-over-heels into a forbidden communion with the heir of a wealthy family. Their longing to transcend their societal constraints was so strong that it drove them to suicide… Is this sounding familiar? Is this deeply rich, painful and sacrificial story not just Romeo & Juliet? Meanwhile, Yuen and Chor, a more pragmatic couple borne from an aspiring egalitarian society, concur that neither would die for the other if it ever came to that. These are two completely different generations of romance, and they collide in a truly ambitious sequence where the modern couple become so strongly possessed by the passion of a bygone era that the sex they have transcends history. If that sounds to you like some hippie bullshit, you’re probably my age.
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow, 2023)
But how’s this for modern? Writer Jake Cole—not to be confused with J. Cole—described this so accurately as “Lena Dunham’s Girls by way of Roy Andersson” that I just flat-out have to steal it. This is probably my favourite comedy of the 2020s, which exposes that some of my favourite comedies tend to have no jokes, rather just people doing weird things with their bodies. (Also considered for this column: Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh.) Following Ann, played by Arnow herself, the film alternates between her shitty low-level corp job and her shitty partner(s) in a casual and passionless BDSM relationship. This draws a humorous contrast between humiliation as kink, and humiliation as… well, just humiliation. Her lack of expression doesn’t indicate a lack of principle, however—one of the bigger chuckles, though no less uncomfortable, comes from her long-term dom relaxedly revealing that he’s a Zionist (Well, I don’t agree with everything Israel does… but yeah.) and Ann slowly rolling over to the other side of the bed without saying a word. In the end, despite expectations only seeming to get lower and the bedroom getting dimmer, there ends up surfacing a glimmer of passion for Ann. A decent and kind man arrives in her life shortly after a pleasant shot of lush greenery dotted by purple beach plum flowers. The first time we actually see Ann, she is full-frontal naked with her fully clothed partner, so the question from thereon becomes “what is vulnerability in a relationship if not physical nakedness?” And the fact that the answer with her new partner ends up being “singing songs from Les Misérables out loud” is funny, sweet and profound.
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