Film This article is more than 22 years oldBetween faking it and making it
This article is more than 22 years oldMark LawsonWhen big screen sex and jealousy move out of the realm of fantasy.One of the best trick beginnings in modern fiction is the narrator's assurance at the start of Julian Barnes's Before She Met Me that the protagonist didn't mind at all the first time he saw his wife committing adultery. The explanation is not that the husband is a voyeur but that the wife is a movie actress and the evidence of her infidelity is on the big screen.
In another novel in which the hero loves a film actress - Justin Cartwright's Half In Love - the man reflects while in bed with his lover that millions of men around the world have seen the breasts he is caressing and that, even as they provide him with private erotic pleasure, they may be the focus of masturbatory fantasies for unknown men.
Because one of the perks of a sexual relationship is the right to know what the person looks like without their clothes, there's a fascination in partners who are forced to share that knowledge, who fear that the genitals of their lover may be freeze-framed on the screen in bedsits by people with only one hand left free to operate the television. If the definition of sex is private knowledge of someone, what happens psychologically when that information is forcibly shared? What is it like to have a partner whose job is to pretend to have sex with someone else?
A situation which understandably fascinates fiction writers has now been addressed as fact in a Prospect magazine article, re-published in the Guardian this week, by Alexander Linklater, whose partner Kerry Fox appears in Intimacy, considered to be the most explicit mainstream movie ever released, and in which she appears to give actual fellatio to Mark Rylance. Linklater explores his jealousies in terms which suggest that Barnes and Cartwright guessed just about right. Fox's partner concludes that a convincing blow-job was acceptable, while cinematic penetration would not be. Like President Clinton, he seems to feel that oral sex does not count as sex.
The problem for the partners of actors is that concern about making up becoming making out on screen may not be paranoia but realism. A large number of actual relationships in entertainment start with people playing lovers. If office romances happen anyway, imagine the greater chances of transgression if the job at a particular office involves the faking of love-making all day.
An additional charge was given to the indifferent thriller Proof Of Life because Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan, playing lovers on camera, were known to have carried on later in camera. The same unscripted kick of realism applies to the television drama in which Amanda Holden and Neil Morrisey had an actors' dalliance much reported in the tabloids.
Because of this historical risk of bedroom-set dialogue being restaged later as hotel conversation, various strategies have been adopted over the years to keep the sex pretend. Actresses preparing to shoot a rooting scene with actors known to cross the film/life border have been known to chew garlic in the make-up trailer.
Many actresses involved in sex-scenes wear (at the instigation of themselves or their partners at home) merkins, taking mental comfort in the fact that these pubic wigs mean that crew and cinema-goers haven't really seen their genitals, even if they think they have. During the filming of the 1976 Barbra Streisand remake of A Star Is Born, when one of the creative team was Streisand's then partner Jon Peters, he was reported to have insisted that co-star Kris Kristofferson wore pants during a love scene in a bath.
Such precautions are encouraged by one of the most prevalent urban myths in movies: The Films In Which They Really Do It. A distinction needs to be made here between hard-core porn, in which actual penetration is routine, and multiplex products, in which the law expects that actors making it are making it up. Even so, the most realistic on-screen sex scenes - such as Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland's Venice encounter in Don't Look Now - have frequently been rumoured to be real.
All the participants deny this and it it can be argued that the best movie love-making consists of fake orgasms between people who have never done it for real. One of the peculiarities of Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, is that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who lived and presumably slept together off-set, bring no erotic power at all to their movie love-scenes.
Perhaps that example is a warning that cinematic sex cannot bear too much reality. Most cinema-goers, if told that a killing in a thriller they'd just watched had been a real one, would feel horrified to have been tricked into seeing a snuff movie. And, while sex is a far less questionable activity than murder, there's still an uneasiness about the idea that the actors and director have forced you to cross the line between entertainment and pornography.
The most celebrated orgasm scene in cinema - Meg Ryan's climax in a diner in When Harry Met Sally - is a fake one which makes the point that it's impossible to tell the difference. While Kerry Fox and Alexander Linklater have courageously answered some often-asked questions - do they ever do it for real? what's it like for their real-life partners? - mystery might be advised in general. When two performers have sex on screen, it's better that we're left in suspense over whether they're having it off or having us on.
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