by GEOFFREY MACNAB
The stars of ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ last month described the misery of filming sex scenes. So what horrors lie ahead for the actors chosen for the ’50 Shades’ movie?
Nobody should be surprised that the two young actresses who starred in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or winning film, Blue is the Warmest Colour, told an interviewer at the Telluride Festival last month that filming the explicit 10-minute lesbian sex scene was “very embarrassing”.
Four months after their triumph in Cannes, Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos confirmed what many must have guessed anyway: shooting a sex scene over 10 days in front of a director and a film crew is gruelling and not very much fun. Watching it with your parents afterwards isn’t much of a riot either.
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It’s a paradox that so-called “adult movies” are made in a thoroughly juvenile way. In these films, character development and plot are expected to be flimsy in the extreme. After all, that is not what the audiences are interested in. The problem for mainstream actors in an internet age is that sex scenes in “serious” movies are bound to be taken out of context and posted online alongside the porn.
Women almost always fare the worst. Take Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972). The critical consensus is that it features one of Marlon Brando’s greatest performances as the despairing middle-aged American who has an anonymous sexual relationship with a much younger woman he meets while looking to rent a Paris apartment. For the young actress Maria Schneider, though, the film was a disaster.
“Poor Maria. I didn’t have the occasion to go to ask her to forgive me a bit because her life was completely swept away by Last Tango in Paris,” Bertolucci said recently of Schneider, who died in 2011. He acknowledged that he may have “robbed her of her youth”. In that infamous scene in which Brando’s character sodomises Jeanne (Schneider) using butter as a lubricant, there is little wonder that Schneider looked so incensed. Neither the director nor Brando had told her what they were planning.
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