The Ethics Of On Screen Eroticism

Call Me by Your Name, the latest feature by Luca Guadagnino ( I Am Love, Bigger Splash) is the third instalment of his desire trilogy, adapted from the novel by André Aciman. It traces the sexual awakening of a teenager, Elio (Timothée Chalamet), sparked by the arrival of an uber-confident young American professor, Oliver (Armie Hammer), who spends the summer with Elio and his family ‘somewhere in Northern Italy’. The ‘subjective camera’ follows Elio’s every thought, from his initial judgement of Oliver as a ‘rude’ American who flits in and out of scenes with the catchphrase ‘later’, to his palpable yearning as they spend time in close proximity, cycling through the hot countryside to a nearby village. Living side by side with only a door separating them is both paradise and pure torment for Elio. Guadagnino conveys the teenager’s discovery of his own sexuality with both solemnity and humour. From low-angle shots that echo Elio’s admiration for Oliver, to the focus on his expression of angst and longing, Call Me by Your Name ensures Elio’s subjectivity is sustained throughout.

This might be the point to mention another Queer film, La Vie D’Adèle ( Blue Is the Warmest Colour, 2013) by French-Tunisian director, Abdellatif Kechiche, starring Adèle Exarchopoulos as 15-year-old Adèle, and Lea Seydoux as the slightly older, peroxide blue-haired artist, Emma. Both films are coming-of-age stories that build a close affinity between the viewer and a teenage protagonist, pulling us into a world of subjective experience.

Perhaps a titillating effect cannot be avoided in a sex scene, for it naturally stirs the audience’s senses. This calls into question the function of art, and whether we can justify visual pleasure. If the spectator of Blue Is the Warmest Colour is drawn into Adèle’s world of sensuality, is this not the director’s achievement of subjectivity? The audience replicates some of how the character feels, but is this moral? Especially when the morals of the actresses are compromised. Léa Seydoux described the director’s painstaking method of shooting — hundreds of takes; 10 hours on the sex scene alone — as “kind of humiliating sometimes, I was feeling like a prostitute”. In light of the recent sexual harassment scandals in the film and theatre industry, the effect of the scene on Seydoux is even more of a sensitive topic.

The question of how filmmakers tackle the challenge of sex on screen arises when trying to convey heightened emotion as opposed to merely displaying carnal pleasure. How can directors negotiate a new language of sex on screen without completely omitting the sex, and without the moral dilemma of visual pleasure?

In Blue Is the Warmest Colour the camera takes care to pause on the subjective pleasure on the women’s faces, raising the film above mere exploitation. Yet there is no escaping the fact that the lengthy love scene shifts from representing Adèle’s pleasure to that of the audience’s. We are given full view of the actresses, a view that the characters would not have experienced themselves. What’s more, during the throes of passion, the characters would almost be blind to the corporeal, therefore the shots of the two making love are clearly for the audience’s pleasure alone. It is easy to evoke pleasure, but the challenges of depicting it remain. A language of desire is achieved with conviction in Blue Is the Warmest Colour and Call Me by Your Name, but a language of love-making, it seems, is yet to emerge. It is time for a new kind of representation of sex on screen, one that can’t double as porn, but rather, a representation that gets inside the heads of the protagonists without solely relying on the body to depict heightened emotional states.

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