Pornosophy: Loving Sex?

Is loving sex all that it’s cracked up to be? Or is it the province of bad movies like Love Story (1970) or another sixties classic A Man and a Woman (1966). One of the nice things about a film like Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013) is that it shies away from loving sex. One of the film’s great scenes is an enormous argument that breaks out in an elegant hotel room which a couple has been treated to as a gift. Instead of passionate lovemaking the time away from the kids turns into a massive back and forth in which mutual recriminations almost end in a breakup. Another classic depiction of non-loving sex occurs in Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) when Claudia (Monica Vitti) discovers Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) in the arms of the American whore Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Polioli). It’s a scene of almost orgasmic disenchantment in which everything that is wrong with the universe is concentrated in one spectacularly revolting embrace. David Lean’s version of Noel Cowards’s Brief Encounter had love, but the encounter was too brief to turn into sex. And then there is the case of the second to the last film John Holmes ever made, The Rise of the Roman Empress (1987). At this point in his career, Holmes already knew he was HIV positive yet he proceeded to have unprotected sex with the Italian porn star and politician La Cicciolina. If there were an award given for malevolently intentioned unloving sex or “loving porking," this film could very well get it. These days loving sex is literally the talk of the town. It’s the only way for students to indulge their promiscuous desires in California under the new “Affirmative Consent” statute which is one of the biggest challenges to the pleasures of the hate fuck. Last Tango in Paris (1972) contained some sex scenes which epitomized the misery of the human condition and are the perfect antidote to the virus of sentimentalism which is on the verge of infecting both cinema and life. The monologue of the nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), in Bergman’s Persona (1966) is also an effective remedy for romantic daydreams, along with the old locker room adage, “tell ‘em you love ‘em and you lay ‘em."

Boyhood

Watching Richard Linklater’s Boyhood one can’t help imagining what Girlhood would have been like. Is such a follow up project in the works? At the end of the movie a young woman who Mason (Ellar Coltrane) the protagonist, whose childhood and early adulthood are followed over 12 years, has befriended remarks, “Everyone always says seize the moment, but it’s just the opposite, the moment seizes us.” It’s a wonderful signature piece of dialogue that both limns a character and defines Linklater’s project. In another scene Mason tells his girlfriend “When they decided it was too expensive to build cyborgs and robots they decided to let humans just turn themselves into robots.” Take your pick one gem follows another. From the moment that husband number two orders that second bottle of wine at dinner, we know that trouble is brewing. Then there are the historical footprints to which the emotional lives of the characters are inextricably attached: crowds of kids waiting in costume for the release of a Harry Potter book, the Iraq war, the excitement of the first Obama/Biden campaign. Linklater's talent like that of a short story writer lies in capturing characters with one or two strokes, in this case pans of the camera. From there, despite whatever extemporization might have occurred during the filmmaking, a determinism takes over and the disquisition is predictable and even longwinded at times. Any one who has seen his trilogy, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight knows the technique of following the actor’s creation of a persona  (Ethan Hawke ,whose character's evolution is traced in the Midnight, Sunrise and Sunset films, is brought back to play Mason’s father in Boyhood). Under the guise of Boyhood’s documentary realism, rendered by a quasi cinema verite style, Linklater is really a sentimentalist with a penchant for painful feel good set pieces which verge on the soap operatic.  Not surprisingly his central character’s interest turns out to be photography (perhaps this is a case of a character mirroring its creator--of art imitating life imitating art). But when you put the metaphoric embryo in its petrie dish how do you dictate a beginning a middle and an end? It may not be life itself. However, the director is creating a fiction whose source lies in the biological development of a real person. The maturation of an individual (being turned into an actor who's ostensibly becoming acclimated to a role) is what the film follows.  It's the dominating concept. And it’s as if the Linklater’s strategy overwhelms the film itself. The choices seem almost arbitrary in their nod to reality and overly factitious in their attempt to impose esthetic order and meaning over the kind of digital scrapbook of images which reside in the average person’s computer. At the end Patricia Arquette, who plays the mother, cries “I thought there would be more,” about the “series of milestones” Boyhood describes. Despite the film’s ambitious agglomeration of detail, it leaves a number of loose ends and the discomforting sense that something is ultimately missing.

Before Midnight

Before Midnight, the third of Richard Linklater’s series of films about a pair of star-crossed lovers, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), begins with a full frontal scene, not nudity, but through the windshield of a car travelling through Greece, with two children sleeping in the back. A psychological tome should be written about the effect of the automobile on dyads. Many couples will recognize the turning point where civilized discussion devolves into argument. It’s a process which Linklater deftly patholgizes not only in cars but throughout the movie. Jesse (Ethan Hawke), who has just left his son off at the airport regrets missing out on the 12 year old's imminent adolescence. Jesse, a divorce, lives in Paris with his new family while the son lives with his mother in Chicago. Regret, blame and responsibility haunt both Jesse and Celine. Celine feels she is always making sacrifices for Jesse, a writer prone to sometimes hollow and self congratulatory protestations of unequivocal devotion (his previous books like the two previous films in the series have documented their relationship) while Jesse has sacrificed the possibility of a closer relationship with his son by remaining in France for the sake of Celine’s career. The film is like a Socratic dialogue in camera, to the extent that it introduces numerous formal propositions, which end up being the substance of domestic squabbles. Some of these have to do with sex (which Celine claims Jesse always  performs the same way, “kiss, kiss, titty, titty, pussy, snore”) some with work (she says her thoughts are "obsessed with shit since that is the only time" she "gets to think") and others with child raising. A totally innocent exchange can easily turn into a fight as past incidents in the relationship are relived. History is hysteria is a popular phrase in the recovery movement. But Linklater is a map maker charting the topography of the emotional lives of his two protagonists. There's passion in the relationship alright, but it’s no match for the power of the perpetual thinking which almost undoes them. At one point Celine claims that she's wanted to stick her head in a toaster like Sylvia Plath and Jesse’s response is to correct her by saying “oven.” The verbal parries stop them dead in their tracks, but in the end also reawaken their love. Before Midnight is an extended discussion and if nothing else it’s a tour de force of anecdotal jewels. At another point an older woman describes how the loss of the memory of her second husband is like a second death, a conversation stopper if there ever was one, but that doesn’t stop anything. The back and forth, in this case over dinner, continues right on into the night.