And, completely coincidentally, that meant the cinema of fucking. First up was Carlos Reygadas' 2005 picture Batalla en el cielo (en ingles, Battle in Heaven, even though it really means “battle in the sky.”)
I remembered exactly two things about it—it had graphically depicted (though apparently unerotic) sex, and it inspired extremely divided critical response. These kinds of pictures always really interest me; when everyone's like “meh” I figure fuck it, there's a Knicks game on. But when the “this is the most brilliant thing since Tarkovsky” people (like Esquire on that poster) are engaged in pitched battle with the “this is pretentious, willfully grotesque horseshit” people (like Lisa Schwarzbaum over at Entertainment Weekly), I start thinking, let's the roll the dice and watch it. I'd like to see the most brilliant thing since Tarkovsky. Why not? It's worth the risk of sitting through pretentious, willfully grotesque horseshit.
Now, I did not like Batalla en el cielo. At all. It's one of those weird male gaze psychological fuckin things where all the women are either nagging, shrewish wives or barely legal sex pixies (which is stupid; women are cooler and more interesting when you appreciate them for the way they really are), and you're eyeball deep in Catholicism for the whole goddamn movie. The (mostly real) sex is difficult to watch, and not for the whole “warped body image wrought by fashion advertisements and porn” reason that you might think. Reygadas' camera lingers on the lumpy, middle-aged bodies of protagonist Marcos and his wife in a way that suggests disgust with flesh, rather than merely observing a naked civilian. All the attractive women in the movie are prostitutes, and worse, the camera leers at them in a vaguely, Catholically disgusted way as well.
The story follows Marcos' descent into existential crisis after he and his wife kidnap a child who dies. Marcos feels intense guilt (go figure) and ends up losing control of his life, falling for, fucking, and confessing to his boss' daughter Ana, who he later stabs to death, following a lengthy countryside freakout. The cops quickly catch up to him, Marcos not having been terribly subtle about stabbing Ana, and then his wife touches him and he collapses, so like was it her who killed him, or symbolism or something? Then the closing shot is Ana (actually) sucking Marcos' dick, just like the opening scene, and they say “I love you” to each other.
However, not having enjoyed the picture at all, I should say I thought it was clearly the work of a real director. Just because I don't give a fuck about God and guilt doesn't mean Reygadas can just be dismissed. He is being a bit sensational at times (actually having Marcos and Ana, an implausible couple to say the very least, have actual sex) but he shows, at other times, a real knowledge of what to do with a camera; even if the images are grimy, they're pretty well composed and there are some nice long shots including one very long take in a car. In fact, his technique is strong enough that if he hadn't overdone the grotesquerie, the dramatic story might have been a bit more compelling. But Reygadas knows what he's doing. All that stuff is in there because he wants it there, so I guess me and him are never gonna be BFFs. Martin Scorsese liked his followup picture, though, which ultimately I'm sure means a lot more to Reygadas than the two cents of some jerkoff blogger, so I say go forth and auteur up a storm, Señor Reygadas. You're clearly doing something right if Marty S. likes you.
After watching Batalla en el cielo, I was a little discontent, so an impromptu double feature was necessary. I got out a Danish picture from the same year called All About Anna.
Like Batalla en el cielo, there is unsimulated sex in All About Anna. But it's from an entirely different perspective. It's not as simple as director Jessica Nilsson being a woman, though that's obviously a huge part of it. Anna, whom the picture is All About, is a far more cosmopolitan character than Marcos (or, for that matter, Ana), and the lack of guilt and horror about sex could be attributable to class, secularism, geography, race, any number of things. That's a discussion for another blog, though; I don't feel like getting all bent of shape with the very guilt that pissed me off in the first movie for liking this one more.
Anna (the beautiful Gry Bay) is a theatrical costume designer living in Copenhagen. She's got this guy, Johan (Mark Stevens), who's a damn handsome fellow and, as Anna says: “A friend once said that every woman needs three men. One for adventure and fun, one for stimulating conversation and one for good sex. Johan was all three.” Well, all right then. Johan, however, is in the habit of hopping on a boat and disappearing for a few years, so eventually Anna is like, all right, moving on.
She meets this nice, kind of boring dude named Frank who she has some fairly decent sex with, but whom she's not sure enough she's serious about that instead of having him move into her new apartment, she takes in kooky party girl Camilla (Eileen Daily). But then Johan randomly turns back up and Anna gets this hungry look in her eyes and they start fucking, with Frank asleep in the other room. Hey, sometimes you just gotta do it. When Frank wakes up, Johan hurriedly writes his phone number on the wall and splits, but Frank erases it before Anna can memorize, and there she is again, no way of getting in touch with Johan. She makes a half-assed attempt at stalking him, but gives up and rededicates herself to her work.
A bigshot French actor shows up and starts his whole ooh-la-la-mademoiselle routine (is it still racist when Danish people do it? Nope, it's fuckin hilarious) and Anna, sensing a career opportunity, flirts back (Ed. Note: flirting with a French guy is utterly redundant if you're a chick) and gets his business card and then, in a potential big career break, a job in Paris working on his show.
So, while Anna's in Paris, she rents out her bedroom to a boarder who turns out to be . . . Johan. She's tempted to stay when she finds this out—they start almost fucking in the stairwell when she's trying to shlep her suitcases to the cab to the airport—but comes up with a classic bit of girl logic: “I'll let him stay in my apartment with my sex-crazed roommate, and if he can go the whole time without hitting it, he can be my boyfriend again.” And she proceeds to thoroughly enjoy herself in Paris, even though she misses Johan and even Camilla.
The roommate situation between Johan and Camilla is tense at first. Camilla, having no idea that Johan is Anna's ex or that the two are still mutually madly, tormentedly in love, starts making a subtle play for Johan. This subtle play consists of walking around naked with bottles of champagne and insisting that she suck his dick (and yes, she actually sucks his actual dick). He puts up a fairly decent fight but does submit, but then he comes in her eye (and yes, you do actually see him come right in her actual eye) and she's like, “Yeah . . . huh . . . that was awkward” and they weirdly become pretty good friends thereafter, even though the sex part completely evaporates, partly because Camilla has her own dude who she's way into.
After Anna's hot French friend Sophie goes down on her (it's all real, except Anna keeps her panties on but she looks like she's thoroughly enjoying herself whether the orgasm is real or not), Anna realizes, yeah girl-girl action with goth-y French chicks rules, but I'm hetero, and I am extremely hetero for that big hunky blonde beefcake Johan, so I'm gonna bop back to Copenhagen ahead of schedule.
Naturally, Anna finds Johan and Camilla in bed together, except she doesn't realize it's just because Johan was keeping Camilla company because she was lonely, and it might as well have been brother-sister (the blowjob debacle having been totally compartmentalized by that point). So Anna freaks out and goes and gets wrecked, and in a scene that's simultaneously creepy and really funny (ya gotta trust me, Europeans are somehow able to pull this shit off) she gets molested by a co-worker of Johan's who keeps getting interrupted by cell phone calls. Anna, instead of freaking out, just goes “eww weird” and heads home to confront the horrors therein.
Only instead of finding Camilla shtupping Johan, Camilla's having “yay we really do love each other” sex with her own dude, and Johan's gone. Cue obligatory race against time and streaky mascara to find the dude before he gets on the boat, except instead of just getting there in the nick of time, she finds Johan fishing in an angsty I-wish-Anna-was-here mood, and they both are like all right, no more of this running around bullshit, let's have a good old-fashioned happy ending. So they get on the boat and they have some out-of-this-universe sex (for realz, including a really real lookin 'gasm from Anna) and the credits roll, and the single funniest closing credit song since Knock-Off—which recounts the whole plot of the movie in a really cute Casio-keyboard sort of way—plays.
All About Anna isn't a great movie by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, in terms of craft and all that serious cineaste-nerd shit, Batalla en el cielo is probably the superior artistic achievement. But All About Anna is a lot more fun to watch. The reductive high-concept pitch—“It's a Dogme 95 rom-com”—pretty much sums it up. Gry Bay makes a very engaging lead as Anna, even if the voiceover is overused and a little too purple-prose “Dear Diary.” Gry Bay is, although a very beautiful woman, still plausible as that jaw-droppingly beautiful woman you actually know. Her guy, on the surface, is the total girl fantasy asshole I usually want to kill—damn those tall, muscular, strong-featured dudes and their big dicks—but he ends up being a reasonable-enough facsimile of an actual person that I'm okay with him by picture's end. Camilla's funny, even though people like her are exasperating in real life; the fact, though, that I looked at her and went, “Oh, yeah, she reminds me of [indie theater woman of a certain age] and [drunker,older version of anonymous ex-girlfriend]” is a good sign, ya know, recognizable as an actual person and all. The French people are French people, and are kind of cartoon characters, but hey, the chick could give lessons on how to go down (she's played by an actual porn star, though she's the one who keeps her clothes on for the whole scene).
That last aside segues into the next point: All About Anna, actual genitals going into actual other genitals notwithstanding, is not porn; Batalla en el cielo even less so. This is a debate I don't find terribly interesting: the standard line tends to be, if there's real sex going on, it's porn and that's that. I maintain that most of the people advancing this argument tend to be slaves to scripturally-derived morality and the rest of them are people who just say it because everyone else does. Sex is a very complex thing with, as the poet said, a “lotta ins, lotta outs,” but when you get right down to it, empirically, it's a physical activity. There are no prohibitions on scenes where characters eat; the actors tend to eat actual food (even if they take practical steps to avoid becoming overstuffed due to multiple takes and so forth). There are no prohibitions on showing characters running, the actor just runs. And hell, when their characters have to kiss, the actors kiss. There's no objective reason why sex should be any different, especially if you do it right (cinematically, of course).
The porn question, if you can get past that stupid unilateral “if there's sex, it's porn” bullshit, then tends to shift toward the intent of the filmmakers, and whether they use real sex to titilate. Batalla en el cielo is very much not porn; Reygadas is trying to shock, not get people to fap. All About Anna isn't either, because Jessica Nilsson doesn't candy-coat anything, she stages the sex scenes the way real people would do it (if they're really, really, really good-looking, but hey, it's a movie). The scene where, after Frank and Anna fuck and his mom calls (the look of “are you fucking kidding me” on Gry Bay's face is awesome) and Frank takes the condom off with come in the end, it's not like “ooh, look at how sexy this is” because it's really not, that stage of things is waste disposal, and it's not like, “eh, look at how vile sex is” because it's not that either, it's just, “yeah, when you're done fucking you have to take the condom off without spilling all the come out of the tip.” Because that's what happens when you're done fucking and you have to take the condom off.
All About Anna ends up triumphing over its occasional technical clunkiness and dumb writing by sheer goodwill. It's a shame that American/British uptightness (not to mention her “odd” name) is probably going to keep Gry Bay from being a huge movie star over here, because she's better at this kind of picture than 99% of the dipshits who star in them, and cuter than just about all of them.
The thing I ended up really liking the most about this mildly ridiculous movie is that it's a movie with a female protagonist who's smart, creative, and who gets laid without anyone tut-tutting at her. We need more sex-positive movies that are actually watchable and engaging; they don't even need to be this sex-positive—All About Anna is downright sex-zealous—but gaddammit, man. Can't we all just admit that people fuck, and that this is a good thing? It is the future, after all. Let's fucking act like it.
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