By Intertwining Sex And Grief, Bernardo Bertolucci and Nic Roeg Reset The Bar For Cinematic Sexual Candor

The film directors Nicolas Roeg and Bernardo Bertolucci died within days of each other in the last weeks of November; Roeg was 90, Bertolucci only 77. In the early 1970s, both men were cited as leading the sexual revolution in cinema via two pictures, each landing a year apart. Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris occasioned the rapture of influential critic Pauline Kael when it screened at the New York Film Festival in the autumn of 1972, while Roeg’s slow-burn horror film Don’t Look Now ignited the usual controversies around Roeg’s work (his non-linear approach to narrative confounded critics perhaps more than it did the small but fervent audiences his prior pictures attracted).

Both films reset the bar, so to speak, for sexual candor. In Tango, the spectacle of Hollywood rebel and one-time sexiest human alive Marlon Brando emotionally baring all in explicit sex scenes opposite a fetching new female face barely out of her teens was a shock not only within the context of the onscreen story, but in a metatextual Twilight of the Icons sense (a factor Bertolucci explicitly acknowledges in the movie itself by giving Brando’s character, Paul, a CV that combines highlights of the star’s on and off screen life). In Don’t Look Now, stars Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland (33 and 38 at the time, respectively) intertwine intimately and heartily in a quick-cutting sex scene (interlaced with, as per Roeg’s style book, shots of the couple dressing for a dinner date) that ignited a lot of adolescent speculation as to whether or not the performers really “did it” (they didn’t) that unfortunately hasn’t abated to this day (that would be 45 years later, folks!).

At the time, both movies seemed “groundbreaking.” Mainstream cinematic practice has subsequently revealed them as anomalies. While neither Bertolucci nor Roeg signed any manifestoes to this effect, they were each in their way trying to get sex in cinema to grow up. Bertolucci’s methodology, as has been widely discussed since his death, included at least one instance of substantial dereliction of his duties as both a director and a human being: in staging and shooting a scene in which Brando’s Paul has anal sex with Maria Schneider’s Jeanne using butter as a lubricant, the director and Brando withheld their mutually dreamed-up special touch for the scene — the stated use of the butter — from Schneider until the day of the shooting, effectively cutting off any potential protest or consultation on her part. In a much-cited interview later in her life, Schneider said the episode left her feeling “humiliated and a little raped.”) Some contemporary critics say that Bertolucci in effect orchestrated an on-screen rape. A recent article by Bilge Ebiri in Vulture lays out the controversy with commendable cogent analysis.

The movie as a whole is more than that scene, and it’s a complex one; among its several themes is the question of whether anonymity can enhance a fierce, no-holds barred intimacy; one of the conditions Paul puts on his entanglement with Jeanne is “no names.” He’s an American expat whose wife has just killed herself; she’s a soon-to-be wed woman who’s clearly ill at ease with having her life arranged for her by others, including her insufferably twee would-be filmmaker boyfriend Tom. Some time after the butter scene, Paul requests that Jeanne penetrate him anally, with her fingers, in a scene that’s still startling.

But what’s most theoretically groundbreaking about Tango, and it’s a quality that Don’t Look Now absolutely shares, is how matter-of-fact it is about sex and its place in people’s lives. Despite their reputations, neither is exactly steeped in nudity; the amount of bare skin and/or sexual activity on Tango doesn’t even amount to ten minutes in a movie that’s 129; the Don’t Look Now sex scene, which has a number of other components within it, is a little over five minutes in a 110 minute picture.

Neither film indulges in the “male gaze” in the leering way we’ve come to understand it, but the ways in which Tango privileges the male perspective in its character dynamics ostensibly weaken the movie in the groundbreaking department.

However much validity Paul’s project might have as a grief-therapy outlet —when they begin their arrangement, Paul tells Jeanne “We’re gonna forget everything we knew, all the people, all that we do, where we live, we’re gonna forget that. Everything,” to which she replies, “I can’t. Can you?” to which he answers “I don’t know.”— the no-names/anything-goes scenario, with a woman at least half the age of the man at that, still has the air of a male pornographic fantasy to it. The movie’s subsequent painful exploration of the arrangement almost dissipates that feeling, but then Bertolucci whiffs it by making Jeanne the literal femme fatale at the movie’s end.

In Don’t Look Now the sex is also tied to grief; the couple played by Christie and Sutherland is coping with the drowning death of their young daughter, a catastrophe that will lead Sutherland’s character down a tragic road. The scene hardly begins on a note of high romance; instead, the two are finishing their toilettes before dressing. Sutherland’s John stands on a scale and Christie’s Laura affectionately observes, “You know those lumps are coming back on the side of your waist.” A helluva way to set up a sex scene…and actually it doesn’t even take off from there. John, an architect, then sits at his drawing desk nude. He’s so at home that everyone is startled when a hotel maid enters their suite with towels; the couple, in Venice where John is set to restore a church, have become very cozy here.

Which is part of the point of the scene; their ardent, devotional lovemaking is an aspect of a good marriage in bad circumstances, an assertion of the life force in the face of inconceivable loss. (And some have theorized that this particular sex act has more significance than even that, and that at the end of the film Laura is newly pregnant.).  

If Bertolucci in his early career explicitly aligned himself with rebellion — via his affinities with Pier Paolo Pasolini, his work with the radical Living Theater on the anthology film Love and Anger, and more, Roeg had a more detached approach, shaking the tree without making his personality explicitly part of his presentation. The Italian Bertolucci was also more explicitly masculinist, while Roeg, especially in this film, made things about genders cohabiting and intermingling. As a result, Don’t Look Now has aged better.

Looking at movies today, though, you can’t really see filmmakers following the artistic examples Roeg and Bertolucci tried to set. (And late in his life, Bertolucci admitted that in his callous treatment of Schneider, he set a poor example indeed.) Sex and nudity in mainstream pictures are components that are loudly announced, not integrated into the stories as part of the characters’ lives. They exist to show skin and lust, not illuminate humanity. Almost twenty years ago I got a look at a screenplay by a then-up-and-coming writer and its instructions for a love scene were “Rudy and Ashley fuck like lovers in an R-rated movie.” The now very much in demand and very well-paid writer of that script’s next big credit is the live-action Dumbo, which hopefully contains no sex scenes.

But let’s not be too hard on the present. First Reformed writer/director Paul Schrader, a filmmaker who did learn a good deal from Bertolucci and Roeg and still tries to put some of that knowledge into practice, recently complained that audiences in the 1970s were more open to “serious” filmmaking than today’s viewers are. There’s no way of proving this, but speaking anecdotally I can say that when Don’t Look Now came out, for as many audience members who truly understood the philosophical and emotional nodes of its sex scene, there were just as many if not more who just couldn’t stop wondering whether they were watching Hollywood movie stars having real intercourse, and deriving nothing more than that from it. Maybe the problem isn’t the times, but most of humanity itself — the impulse to deride that stems from our own fear of being seen to take matters of life and death too seriously, especially in art or “entertainment.”

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny  reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com , the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream Don't Look Now