Erotic Films Seduce Venice Film Festival

Venice has its sexy back. Erotica of all varieties—gay, straight, kinky, and theoretical—is on display at this year’s Venice Film Festival, with plenty of hot action on screen and little of it gratuitous.

Two of the most popular titles of this year's festival: Halina Reijn Girl and the TV series Disclaimer by Alfonso Cuarón — opens with orgasms. Girl The film also culminates in its conclusion, with star Nicole Kidman, who plays a tech executive who discovers a passion for BDSM, in a state of near-or total striptease for much of the film.

Queeran adaptation of the autobiographical novel by William S. Burroughs, and the last of Challengers AND Call me by your name Director Luca Guadagnino, seemingly on a personal mission to bring sexy cinema back into vogue, stars Daniel Craig as a drug-addicted American expatriate in Mexico circa 1950 who begins obsessing over and courting a younger, bisexual sailor, played by Drew Starkey.

Italian feature Future Diva by Giulia Louise Steigerwalt, explores the legendary Italian porn studio founded by Riccardo Schicchi, which launched the careers of porn stars such as Cicciolina, Moana Pozzi and Éva Henger. And Love by Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, the second in the series Sex/Love/Dreams trilogy is a verbally explicit, though never visually graphic, exploration of the contrast between the sex we have, or desire, and the sex society expects us to have and enjoy.

“As a consumer, sometimes I just want to see a hot movie, a sexy movie,” Reijn said. The Hollywood Reporterexplaining the explicit scenes in Girlwhich include a lot of oral, digital and verbal stimulation, “with hot people in scenes that turn me on a little bit.”

Adds Starkey: “Yeah, it looks like the festival is pretty hot this year. I’m pretty excited about that.”

But while there is plenty of hot, heavy action on screen, the sex on display at the Lido this year is decidedly different from the erotic films of decades past. The aim is not, as in the 1970s (think Last Tango in Paris, The Night Porter OR Don't look now)to shock conservative viewers and break taboos. Pornhub was launched in 2007. We can assume that all sexual taboos are now completely and utterly broken. Nor are these new sexy films a repeat of the wave of erotic thrillers of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the era of Dressed to Kill, Basic instinct, Fatal AttractionOR Body of evidencewhere sensual excitement and sexual menace mixed together, and you could be sure that the most fiery leading ladies would receive their comeuppance in the final reel.

The aim of the new hot and heavy cinema is more therapeutic. Girl teases with elements of the 90s erotic thriller. Nicole Kidman plays a powerful CEO dissatisfied with her marital sex with sexy husband Antonio Banderas who seeks satisfaction in a sadomasochistic relationship with her young intern, played by Harris Dickinson, putting her career and family at risk.

“I was incredibly inspired by all the sex thrillers of the 90s: Basic instinct, Fatal Attraction, 9 and a half weeks, Indecent proposal,” Reijn notes, “this film is in dialogue with them. But this is my response, my female response, to those films.”

Reijn takes the Fatal Attraction plot and gives it a feminist and sex-positive twist. The result is an erotic holiday thriller for the whole family.

By Cuarón DisclaimerDespite its many steamy scenes – one, involving hot MILF Catherine (Leila George) seducing student Jonathan (Louis Partridge) at an Italian beach resort, it seems, in the words of DAYreview of, directly from the Penthouse Forum — the purpose is not mere excitement. In his Rashomonin giallo style, Cuarón's true purpose in exploiting these erotic tropes is very different than one might initially expect, and isn't revealed until the final episode of the seven-part series.

With QueerGuadagnino also shows us a lot of skin and doesn't hold back in describing the attraction between Lee (Craig) and Allerton (Starkey), the man he becomes erotically obsessed with. But sex in Queer is less about sensual satisfaction and more about a corrosive desire for connection and intimacy that Lee finds impossible to achieve.

“We’re talking about love between men in the ’50s, when there was no real language available to describe it, to define yourself,” Starkley says.

Similarly, the two explicit sex scenes in Bradley Corbet's film The Brutalist — this year's favorite for the Golden Lion in Venice — have no erotic charge and are instead used to reveal the nature of the trauma experienced by Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) and his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who fled Europe after World War II to try to start a new life in America.

Perhaps the most radical use of sex on screen exhibited in Venice this year is Lovethe second in a trilogy about sexual behavior and social norms by Norwegian author and director Dag Johan Haugerud. It's a film full of sexual discourse: the characters spend virtually all their time discussing, in intimate and often medical ways, the kind of sex they have, the kind of sex they want, and what they fear it says about them, but there's not a single depiction of actual sex on screen.

“I find it hard to watch sex scenes in movies because I question the function of them,” Haugerud says. “People have sex in different ways and you can't ask [the actors] to bring their own sexual experience into the shoot because it's very private, so they always tend to do what you would call 'cinematic sex', it's sex that doesn't feel very truthful or realistic.”

The aim of his new trilogy, the first film, Sexpremiered in Berlin with great success, the third, Dreamswill be released later this year — was, Haugerud says, to make films “about sex without showing sex but having the actors be as concrete and direct as possible when talking about sex.”

The conversations in Haugerud's trilogy are neither seductive nor dangerous. Her characters speak simply and empathetically about the most intimate aspects of their lives, without fear of being judged or condemned. The film's radical approach is to treat sexuality pragmatically, as an important and significant part of all our lives that deserves careful and serious attention. We talk about sex, baby, but there's no need to get worked up about it.

“It has a touch of the idealistic or utopian, but I don't think it's unrealistic,” Haugerund says. “As a filmmaker, I want us to think about these questions and, with my films, present a picture of the kind of society in which these kinds of conversations can take place. It's possible.”