Antichrist: Chaos reigns

CHRISTMAS SPECIAL

DIRECTED BY Lars von Trier, 2009

STARRING Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong real sex, bloody violence and self-mutilation
RUN TIME 104 mins, Chelsea Films

COVER QUOTE 'Twisted, depraved and troubling… and also utterly brilliant' - Dave Edwards, The Mirror

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT Antichrist was largely ridiculed when it first screened at Cannes: jeers and laughter were followed by boos from the audience, amid isolated applause. Word quickly spread of the film's extremely violent sexual content, which reaches its peak with an extremely graphic image of female self-mutilation. Von Trier explained that he had been clinically depressed at the time of making the film and this was his way of working through those feelings. The Dogme-tic director called Antichrist, 'the most important film of my entire career'. NB It's entirely possible you may not want to read beyond this point, and I wouldn't blame you. Not one bit.

THE PLOT Prologue On a snowy night, in a beautiful, luminous black-and-white that's almost a parody of good taste, von Trier shows Gainsbourg and Dafoe having sex, to the accompaniment of a washing machine, while their baby son, Nic, falls from their apartment window to the snow-covered pavement below.

Chapter 1: Grief Charlotte Gainsbourg's character (I'm going to call them by the actors' first names, let's hope it doesn't get too confusing) collapses at Nic's funeral; the next time we see her is in hospital, one month later. Her husband, Willem (I know, but I'm going to plough on), a therapist, insists on overruling her doctor and takes Charlotte home for treatment. They work through a series of mental exercises together, which includes identifying her biggest fear. This, it seems, is centred on their country cabin, Eden; they travel there to confront her trauma. Willem sees a doe with an apparently dead fawn hanging from her hindquarters.

Chapter 2: Pain (Chaos reigns) Charlotte is suddenly overcome with terror and runs to the cabin, where Willem finds Polaroid pictures of her trip there in the summer with their son. Her antipathy towards Willem is heightened; she describes a scene from her earlier holiday when she could hear a baby crying even though Nic was fine. Willem this time comes across a bloody fox eating itself. It speaks the words: 'Chaos reigns.'

Chapter 3: Despair (Gynocide) Gynocide is the title of the thesis Charlotte was working on when she visited the cabin in the summer; climbing into the attic, Willem discovers her abandoned thesis, among many disturbing images of women being punished. In her notebook, Charlotte's writing deteriorates to an alarming scrawl. In a role-play game, Charlotte identifies with the arguments used against the women in her work.

Charlotte discovers Nic's autopsy report, which Willem has been hiding from her. In it, the coroner notes an earlier deformity of the bones in Nic's feet; in the Polaroids, Willem sees that Charlotte put Nic's shoes on the wrong feet. Charlotte attacks Willem, this time with a hatred and intensity not seen before, knocking him out and then attaching a metal weight to his leg. When Willem wakes he manages to crawl away and hide in a fox hole Charlotte has previously identified. She finds Willem's hiding place, drawn by the cries of a crow with which he is buried, and attacks him with a spade.

Chapter 4: The Three Beggars Charlotte rescues Willem from the foxhole and drags him back to the cabin. 'Do you want to kill me?' he asks. 'Not yet,' is the less-than-reassuring response. She is, she says, awaiting the arrival of the 'three beggars', at which time 'someone must die'. She remembers the opening scene of Nic's death; Charlotte saw him open the window and climb to his death. She cuts off her clitoris with a pair of scissors and then goes into the woods. Willem finds a wrench and manages to remove the weight from his leg; when Charlotte finds him she stabs him with scissors but Willem grabs her and strangles her. He burns her body in front of the cabin, an image filled with hundreds of bodies on the hillside.

Epilogue Willem leaves, watched by the three beggars: crow, deer and fox. Hundreds of faceless figures surround him.

THE FILM Antichrist was my Number One film for 2009. I saw it with a woman friend; you'll have gathered it's not a date movie. Its emotional effect is perhaps diminished with time but Antichrist does repay repeat viewings, and remains shocking.

Von Trier's film has a definite look, from the pristine black-and-white of the prologue through the seeped colours of the funeral scene. Willem Dafoe's early appearances are reminiscent of Tilda Swinton in Tony Gilroy's exemplary corporate drama Michael Clayton (2007) playing a very different role: the character Willem is accused of being aloof, and this is underlined by the blues and greys of his suits and settings. 'You've always been distant,' Charlotte says. 'Okay, can you give me some examples,' he replies. (I think this is supposed to be funny, and it is.)

Willem's arrogance is the initial root of the problem: a therapist, he ignores the dictum never to treat your own family and believes he is smarter than the younger doctor treating Charlotte. 'Trust others to be smarter than you,' she pleads, 'you're not a doctor.' But this is a dick thing, and his penis becomes a target when Charlotte seeks to punish him. When they get home and Willem can begin to work on her, she adds: 'I never interested you until now.' (It is very easy to imagine Charlotte Gainsbourg in the role of trophy wife.)

But there is something darker lurking under the surface, as von Trier shows us in the last shot in Charlotte's hospital room, when his camera zooms in on the murky, green water in a flower vase, rooting among the rotting stems. Antichrist moves into classic horror movie territory: the countryside, but here the enemy is not zombies, or malevolent yokels, but nature, notably women's nature. 'Nature is Satan's church,' according to Charlotte. And, later, 'Women do not control their own bodies, nature does.'

They set off to their woodland cabin, Eden, which is plagued by noisy acorns, which drop noisily on the roof, and ticks, which gorge themselves on Willem's exposed flesh. Willem is demonstrably unprepared for the countryside, equipped only with his smart overcoat and trendy bag as opposed to Charlotte's waterproof slicker and rucksack. 'You were the one who always wanted to go,' he chides, revealing a split in their relationship.

Last summer she went to the cabin with their son, Nic, but Willem did not join them. While there she worked on her aborted thesis, which perhaps provoked a previous breakdown, unnoticed by therapist Willem. An early breakthrough is thwarted when a fledgling chick falls out of tree (almost as in Breillat's Anatomy of Hell), is infested with ants, and then plucked up and eaten by a bird of prey. She attacks Willem for coming to her place: 'You shouldn't have come here, you're just so damn arrogant.'

The film's end credits list a series of researchers in a salutory range of specialisms: misogyny; mythology and evil; anxiety; horror films; music (the haunting theme used at the film's beginning and close is Lascia ch'io pianga, from Georg Friedrich Handel's opera Rinaldo); theology, and therapy (therapeutic consultants and teacher, rather, which is not quite the same thing). The denouement is an orgy of bloody sexuality, excruciating violence and animal cameos that unexpectedly fulfills Charlotte's prophecy: 'When three beggars arrive, someone must die.'

Dafoe the actor emerges in heroic mode - it's impossible not to think of his deserted figure in Platoon (1986), then set to Barber's Adagio for Strings. Framed against the hillside here, he has crafted a crutch from a branch and kneels to pick berries: the very outdoorsman, he has vanquished the wild west of womanhood.

KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 00:27 Charlotte and Willem are having sex in the shower; von Trier shows the snow outside, steam exiting through a vent, and a penis during intercourse. (Dafoe and Gainsbourg had body doubles: porn stars Mandy Starship and Horst Stramka.) All the while, the couple's baby, Nic, climbs out of his cot and pushes a chair underneath a window. Nic climbs up onto the sill; his look of wonder at the falling snow is reflected in Charlotte's absorption in the act of sex, and an air of completeness, satisfaction, at its end.

Chapter 8, 1:05:30 Following her breakdown, Charlotte seems to an aquire a frantic physical need for sex, this culminates in a scene in the cabin where she mounts Willem and tells him to hit her 'so it hurts'. He refuses and she runs out, naked, into the woods: beneath a tree, she masturbates furiously before Willem joins her and they have sex. The roots of the tree are filled with grasping hands - this image, or forms of it, was used on many posters for the film at the time of its cinema release.

Chapter 9, 1:11:57 Charlotte throws herself on top of Willem, then staves in his crotch with a substantial log. When she notices his erection, even though he has passed out, she jerks him off until he ejaculates blood. This is when she goes for a toolbox and, using a hand drill, attaches a round weight through his leg.

Chapter 10, 1:27:20 Charlotte kisses Willem, undresses and lies next to him, pulling his hand between her legs. Following a flashback to the night of Nic's death, the moment when she cuts off her clitoris is shown in detail.

FURTHER VIEWING Where to begin with von Trier? There's Dancer in the Dark (2000), which seemed to drive pop star Björk almost to breakdown (von Trier claimed she tried to eat her dress on set); The Idiots (1998), probably the single film that allowed him to put such strong images as those in Antichrist on the screen; or incredibly spooky TV series The Kingdom (1994), set in a hospital peopled with a gallery of eccentric and unforgettable characters. Then there's Beneath the Waves (1996), which features an incredible central performance from Emily Watson, and is one of the most shockingly blasphemous pieces of cinema you'll ever see. Wonderful.

KEY QUOTE 'Never screw your therapist' - Willem Dafoe's character

Merry Christmas and have a very happy 2011!

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Czech mates

DIRECTED BY Philip Kaufman, 1988

STARRING Daniel Day-Lewis (Tomas), Juliette Binoche (Tereza), Lena Olin (Sabina)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex

RUN TIME 165 mins, Warner Bros

COVER QUOTE 'The most erotic serious film since Last Tango in Paris' - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT With Christmas drawing close I thought I'd indulge myself with a couple of not exactly festive films, but snowy ones (see also next week). This adaptation from the book by Milan Kundera is not explicit, but it is sexy. The sex scenes now seem coy, when the same wording is used by the BBFC for such a film as Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007), which was rumoured on release to feature unsimulated intercourse.

THE PLOT Prague, 1968: Tomas, a young doctor, flirts with a nurse, telling her to take off her clothes; he visits Sabina - who is described as 'the woman who understood him best', and who complains he never stays till morning, nor does he ever allow a woman to spend the night at his ('Are you afraid of women, doctor?'). Tomas travels to a spa where he meets and flirts with the apparently innocent Tereza. She comes to visit him in Prague, unannounced, and ends up staying.

Tomas introduces the two main women in his life in the hope Sabina can help Tereza, who is starting out as a photographer. Tereza and Tomas marry, with Tomas' farmer patient Pavel and his pet pig Mephisto as witnesses, but Tomas continues to have affairs - on the night Tereza confronts him, the Russians invade: she runs out to take photographs, which she hands over to Dutch journalists. Sabina flees to Geneva, where she begins an affair with a married university professor, Frans. When Tomas and Teresa also go to Switzerland, the latter struggles to find work and returns, unannounced, to Czechoslovakia. Tomas follows.

Hounded from his work as a surgeon because of anti-Communist article he wrote before the invasion, Tomas becomes a window cleaner, with the particular perks that affords a man of his nature. Tereza decides to embark on an affair with a customer in the bar where she works (played by Stellan Skarsgard, Mamma Mia!) but it appears this may have been a trap. Sick of the suspicion lurking in Prague, Tereza insists they move again; they join Pavel on his farm.

The scene shifts to the United States, where Sabina has set up as an artist. She receives a letter saying Tomas and Tereza have died in a car accident. After a night out dancing, Tomas and Tereza drive back to the farm; he says, perhaps for the first time, that he is happy.

THE FILM When I was at university, Milan Kundera's book of The Unbearable Lightness of Being was pretty much prescribed reading for every poseur on campus. I loved it. Kundera has fallen out of fashion, as has this form of tasteful, epic cinema, to which director Kaufman added a healthy smattering of sex. It's a strange film as it seems to be linked by its almost non-stop score, from the opening spa scenes, through the comic themes of Tomas' seductions, the darkness of the Soviet invasion to bucolic countryside themes at the close.

Much of the sex in the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being is played for comedy: Tomas orders a nurse to strip for him in his hopital, with fellow surgeons and a patient looking on from an adjoining room; Tereza leaps onto Tomas after a spurious check up ('Don't worry, I'm a doctor'); on another occasion, the camera pans to their dog, Karenin, looking mournful. The only time the sexual anticipation is serious is when Tereza takes nude pictures of Sabina: Tereza's eyes fill with tears at the exposure of her husband's lover before Sabina continues the seduction. The looks on Tereza's face as Sabina begins her friend's exposure preempts Maggie Gyllenhaal's similar predicament in Secretary.

Kaufman (writer/director of The Right Stuff and writer on the Indiana Jones movies) makes the most of his two women stars: Olin shows off her legs from the start, stretching her acting muscles when she moves to Geneva. Binoche rises above her silly accent to produce a startling performance: I've never warmed to her onscreen, nor is she conventionally sexy, but her defenceless portrayal rises above the innocent gamine Tereza could easily be.

The director, however, is better on the historic than the personal: his film was fêted on its release for the method (much like Woody Allen's Zelig) he inserted his characters into contemporary, often black-and-white, footage of the Prague invasion, even to the appropriation of famous images. Those scenes have lost nothing of their power more than 20 years on from the film, and 40 after the events which inspired them. The scenes of the couple's flight are particularly poignant, reenacted as they were following the fall of the Iron Curtain.

KEY SCENES Disc One, Chapter 5, 17:27 In the iconic image that is used on the DVD cover, Sabina poses in bowler hat and underwear over a mirror that has been placed on the floor by Tomas. In the following scene, Tereza visits Tomas at his flat for the first time. She sneezes and he pretends to give her a physical examination before she jumps him.

Chapter 8, 27:03 Sabina and Tomas are having sex, with her on top, when she spots him checking his watch in the mirror. She hides one of his socks in revenge.

Chapter 13, 50:47 Tereza is swimming in the public baths when she has a hallucination: the group of women exercising in front of her are suddenly naked. Among them she spots Tomas, who seems to be offering her own nude figure up. That night she tells Tomas she wants to see the women with whom he has affairs: 'Take me to them, I'll undress them for you.'

Chapter 22, 1:24:44 Tereza asks Sabina to model nude for her; they drink and Tereza takes pictures, before Sabina turns the tables on Tereza. Their assignation is interrupted by the arrival of Franz, who declares he has left his wife. Sabina asks him to come back the next day; when he returns, her studio is completely bare.

Disc Two, Chapter 31, 16:14 On his window cleaning rounds, Tomas is seduced by the wife of a high-ranking party member. At home that night, Tereza smells the woman's sex in Tomas' hair. Tereza cannot understand how he can make love to women without being in love. 'I wish I could be like you,' she says. 'Insensitive.'

Chapter 33, 22:27 Tereza decides to visit an engineer she meets in the bar where she works but she believes she is being spied upon and is initially unresponsive: she allows herself to be undressed and forces herself to go through with it.

FURTHER VIEWING Kaufman's film is steeped in the history of Czech cinema, feeling particularly close to Milos Forman's bawdy The Firemen's Ball (1967). (In the 1970s and '80s, of course, Forman was working in Hollywood on such movies as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus.) There's another Czech director whose work I'd like to highlight here, however, partly because he's made a few films based on the work of another great Czech writer, Bohumil Hrabal, including, most recently, I Served the King of England (2006).

Jirí Menzel's masterwork is probably Larks on a String (1969), but it's to another Hrabal adaptation I turn here: Closely Observed Trains (1966). Set in a rural railway station it manages to combine a young man's crisis over the loss of his virginity, resistance efforts to delay the Nazi invasion and the station manager's predilection for stamping the naked bottoms of young women with his official seal. Unforgettable.

KEY QUOTE 'Take off your clothes' - Tomas, repeatedly

The Wayward Cloud: Melon obsession

DIRECTED BY Tsai Ming-Liang, 2005

STARRING Lee Kang-Sheng (Hsiao-Kang), Chen Shiang-Chyi (Shiang-Chyi), Sumomo Yozakura (Japanese porn actress)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains pornography theme, strong sex and one scene of sexual assault

RUN TIME 114 mins, Axiom Films

LANGUAGE Mandarin

COVER QUOTE 'High comedy, high-camp musical numbers and a vast amount of hardcore porn' - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT The Wayward Cloud was released in the UK simultaneously with Tsai's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006). The latter is the better film, but The Wayward Cloud is brighter, camper - and probably the most unusual sex film you'll see.

Born in Malaysia, of Chinese background, Tsai moved to Taipei aged 20 to continue his studies. After a visit home, he intended to make a film about foreign labour but this transformed into a story about porn stars. To Tsai they lead a double life and find it hard to be accepted.

THE PLOT Taiwan is in the grip of drought: the foremost method of hydration is either bottled water or comes from watermelons, which are experiencing a boom. Chen and Lee, from Tsai's earlier What Time Is It Over There (2001), meet in a park; a watchseller in that movie, he now acts in porn films. He helps her find a key and they both try to open a mysterious locked suitcase and hang out together, smoking or cooking. (In one scene in the kitchen, they reenact the lobster escape from Annie Hall, this time with crabs.)

He washes in the water tank on the roof of the building, she fantasises over a giant watermelon she keeps in the fridge. She inserts it up her top and walks around with it as if pregnant, simulating giving birth on the building's stairs. A film crew is making a porn movie in the same building; when Chen finds the lead actress passed out in the lift she takes her back to her flat but the shoot continues, using the unconscious woman. Throughout there are many musical numbers.

THE FILM The Wayward Cloud opens in a generic, grey underpass but much of the film, interspersed by kitsch musical numbers, couldn't be more colourful. Even the watermelons, which lie at the heart of director Tsai's fantasy, glow green and bleed bright red.

The musical numbers involve a glittery reptilian creature basking at night-time in the building's rooftop watertank (the Nat King Cole-like The Half-Moon), a torch song number (sung by actress Lu Yi-Ching) and another featuring conical bra-ed women bearing plungers in a bathroom full of urinals and a man dressed as a penis - literally a knobhead (Be Patient!). In another, a bevy of women fondle a smiling statue of Chiang Kai-Shek, while the Laughing Policeman-inspired song highlight features a cross-dressing date gone wrong and a troupe of dancers bearing umbrellas emblazoned with a watermelon motif (What a Date!).

With its 1970s soundtrack, Deep Throat could be a porn musical, and director Gerry Damiano was keen to see a big-budget cinema that embraced hardcore sex. Albeit as a Taiwanese art-house movie, The Wayward Cloud is somewhere close to meeting his dreams, with its over-the-top musical numbers.

While the songs in Tsai's movie are surprising populous - on a par with Les Demoiselles de Rochefort at times - the non-musical scenes tend to feature one person on his or her own, and even when there are more people present - the couple of Lee and Chen, or the porn film crew - very little is said, if anything. The songs feature essentially the only dialogue in the movie.

By contrast, the amateur porn shoot in Lucas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart is a far more chatty, argumentative affair. The subjects in both films are equally isolated from the outside world: Moodysson's characters bound to their flat, those in Tsai's film getting no further than their building's stairs or lift, which seems to go nowhere. Both directors are concerned with their characters as outsiders: an extreme of embodiment of the urban alienation which is a favourite theme of their films.

Despite its extreme scenarios and premise, there is no full-frontal nudity in The Wayward Cloud. There is, however, the rape of the porn actress while she is unconscious so that the film's shoot can continue unhindered. It could be funny if it weren't unconscionable. Chen has previously recognised her from a porn DVD she watches wide-eyed; she comes to realise her partner Lee's new profession.

At the begininning of the film, Chen is presented as somewhat unhinged, hanging around road works insisting she has lost her key amid the builders' heavy machinery. She does find her key, however, and Lee helps her dig it up from the freshly laid tarmac. Water wells up in the hole he has created but, even in these drought-afflicted times, it is ignored.

KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 2:12 A woman in a nurse's uniform lies splayed on a bed. Between her legs is half a very large watermelon. A man in a white coat first licks and then puts his finger in the watermelon, moving it in and out firmly. He inserts more fingers and moves them more vigorously. The woman acts as if he is jacking her off; he feeds her big pieces of the fruit and licks the juice off her naked body. They have sex with him wearing the carved-out watermelon shell like a helmet.

Chapter 5, 45:52 The porn crew are filming a scene in a bathroom. The porn star is bent over the woman, fucking her from behind, as a crew member improvises the effect of a shower using water bottles. In disgust, he finally runs out of water. They continue with some very murky-looking green water.

Chapter 7, 1:02:00; 1:05:24 The man masturbates in a doorway watching the Japanese female star playing with herself on a kitchen counter. She uses a small water bottle but stops when the top comes off; a crew member is ordered to help.

Chapter 10, 1:34:00 In the final scene, the male porn star is filmed having sex with his unconscious female counterpart. The crew variously hold up or manipulate her body as required. Chen watches them and becomes vocally aroused; at the crucial moment, the porn actor leaps up and comes in her mouth.

FURTHER VIEWING Lee Kang-Sheng stars in all of Tsai's films from their debut Rebel of the Neon God (1992), usually lending his name to his characters. They met in a video games arcade.

KEY QUOTE 'The [bottle] cap's inside the Japanese girl. Go see' - porn film director

BONUS CURIO For the film, Tsai made star Lee die his pubic hair 'a golden colour, like a lion's mane.'

Intermission: Leap Year

Director Michael Rowe was inspired to write Leap Year, which is out this Friday, by a story he was told 'about a conservative woman who'd accepted a sadomasochistic relationship in order to keep her lover from leaving.' Laura (Monica Del Carmen) is a freelance business journalist: her day is made up of ringing editors for work ('30 tips to take advantage of the economic crisis'), carrying the can when things go wrong, eating, cleaning (the fridge), reading (Erich Fromm), wanking. She's also alone: a ring on her hand and picture by her bedside may hint at a man in her life but she pretends to family and one-night stands she has a full time seeing friends, going out and eating well, when she's mooching around in her pyjamas scoffing something from a tin.

Set in Mexico, Leap Year portrays a very different life to that of Y tu mamá también's spoiled brats, rather Laura could be a grown-up daughter of the indigenous couple at the centre of Battle in Heaven. Australian Rowe has lived in Mexico for 16 years and says he has an outsider's perspective on Mexican society, though the Spanish-language film is very much an inside job: other than views from the window, his camera never leaves Laura's flat. This is Rear Window without the repressed sexuality; Laura masturbates watching the next-door couple performing mundane tasks.

Laura misses their intimacy, which she finds in Arturo, a man who takes sly interest in her while dealing out beatings. Their sex progresses in the manner of the couple in Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, through throttling and pissing to knives. Initially submissive, Laura strips ready for sex every time Arturo appears, like Cécilia in L'ennui. Throughout the film Laura crosses off the days of her February calendar; she takes control of the relationship towards the end of this leap-year month - it could be called 29 Days Later.

Emmanuelle: Arsan about

DIRECTED BY Just Jaeckin, 1974

STARRING Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle), Daniel Sarky (Jean), Christine Boisson (Marie-Ange), Marika Green (Bee), Alain Cuny (Mario)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex and nudity

RUN TIME 90 mins approx, Optimum

COVERLINE 'Full uncut version: never before seen in the UK' (in capital letters, naturally)

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT The debut of a long-running film franchise, Emmanuelle is based on a purportedly autobiographical work from the 1950s published under the name Emmanuelle Arsan, real name Marayat Rollet-Andriane. (It's been said that the series of books written by her were penned by her diplomat husband, however.) The film became a more acceptable version of Deep Throat for cinema audiences around the world, running for more than 10 years at one cinema in Paris until it closed in February 1985.

Over the decades since its release, many of the cuts originally demanded by the BBFC have been reinstated. The most contentious issue is the film's gratuitous depiction of sexual violence - notably, Emmanuelle's reaction to it - but, in 2007, the full film was finally released, uncut.

THE PLOT Emmanuelle travels to Thailand to join her diplomat husband, Jean. Prior to her arrival, Jean has boasted to his colleagues of their tremendous, open, sexual relationship (and, indeed, shown them naked pictures of her). Though Emmanuelle was faithful to him at home in Paris, she sleeps with two men on the flight to Bangkok.

Arrived in Thailand, Emmanuelle has to cope with the boredom of the expat-wife lifestyle as well as the advances of at least one predatory lesbian, Ariane. Emmanuelle is drawn into the plans of gamine Marie-Ange and falls for archaeologist Bee. When she accompanies the latter on a trip, Jean is overtaken with jealousy and visits first a strip club, where he gets into a fight, and then Ariane, with whom he has violent sex.

Bee tells Emmanuelle she doesn't love her after they've had sex and Emmanuelle returns home, heartbroken. Jean, Marie-Ange and Ariane all encourage her to accept the advances of their ageing friend Mario. He takes her to an opium den, where she is raped, and then offers her as prize to the winner of a Thai boxing match.

THE FILM Emmanuelle gives me a headache. It's not just the migraine-inducing soundtrack (by Pierre Bachelet) but also the grotesque cod philosophising. Add to that dubious sexual politics and it's surprising this film has such a reputation that it is continously revisited, either in new versions or rereleases.

There is, too, the film's take on its Thai setting as the 'exotic East', reinforced by Emmanuelle's first experience of the sights and clamour of a Bangkok market. The film's view of the locals is little better: when Emmanuelle and Jean go to bed to have sex, they're watched by their houseboy and a maid. The houseboy then chases the maid into the garden and what begins playfully appears to end in rape; this is a theme revisited at the film's end.

In the meantime, there's an aspect of the movie that's less commented on, but equally troubling. Along with Bee, Emmanuelle quickly falls under the spell of the much younger Marie-Ange, whose no-nonsense sexual manner she admires; Emmanuelle wants to achieve Marie-Ange's innocence.

The latter is portrayed in a very childlike manner: she's usually seen sucking on a lolly ('It makes the old guys hot for you,' she explains) and has no qualms about stripping off, even masturbating (to a magazine photograph of Paul Newman), in front of others. She says she has played with herself since she was 12, but it's never clarified how old she is; she admits to fancying Jean and, later, he says they have been spending the night together.

At the film's start, we are almost immediately given a glimpse of Sylvia Kristel's pubic hair, as she lounges in her Paris home. The big muffs of the seventies must be a great boon to filmmakers as they surely cover any number of potential arguments with censors. The only pricks on show here, however, are the men themselves.

Most of Emmanuelle's sex scenes are fairly desultory affairs: the lesbian liaisons tend to revolve around squash games, clinches in the locker room or, oddly, against a ladder propped up in the corner of the court, which would surely be a hazard to any player. Thai performers are depicted in much more explicit scenarios, not least when one is shown smoking using her vagina.

Pleasure, freedom, hypocrisy and eroticism are the film's buzz words but the dialogue becomes unpalatable with the arrival of lothario Mario. He professes that 'love between couples should be outlawed. Every act of love must include a third person.' This pseudo philosophy leads to the rape of Emmanuelle in an opium den, followed by her subjugation in front of a room full of spectators. (Ariane also tells Emmanuelle that Jean 'practically raped' her.)

Neither scene is as graphic as we've come to expect nowadays but it was only a few years ago that the BBFC allowed the film to pass uncut, because of the board's standards on the eroticisation of sexual violence, particularly when a victim is depicted enjoying a non-consensual act. Don't let the seventies fluff that fills most of this film fool you - there's a darker message here that, exceptionally, seems to have been allowed through.

KEY SCENES Chapter 3, 16:28 Emmanuelle goes for a swim, naked, with the camera following her underwater. She is joined by Marie-Ange.

Chapter 4, 25:27 Emmanuelle is shown having sex with two men, separately, on her flight to Bangkok: first in her seat then, with the other man, in the plane's surprisingly roomy bathroom.

Chapter 7, 52:11 A performer at a sex club visited by Jean smokes a cigarette with her vagina; a couple then participate in a lesbian floor show.

Chapter 8, 55:36 Bee and Emmanuelle make love; the former manages to climax with the latter apparently biting her knee.

Chapter 10, 1:18:28 Emmanuelle is raped at the opium den she attends with Mario.

Chapter 11, 1:24:11 Emmanuelle is taken from behind by the victor of a Thai boxing bout at Mario's behest, in front of a room full of spectators.

FURTHER VIEWING There are any number of further Emmanuelle adventures, many boasting different spellings of our heroine's name (IMDb lists some 70 entries). By the time of Emmanuelle IV (1984), Kristel undergoes plastic surgery and is replaced (by Mia Nygren), although she did revisit the role in the early 1990s. The series had long before reached its nadir with Carry on Emmanuelle (1978), an unhappy mingling with the camp British comedy franchise.

Fans of 1970s softcore may want to investigate the work of photographer David Hamilton. His silly, Vaseline-lensed romps feature more naked young women, including - in Premiers Désirs (1984) - Emmanuelle Béart, as well as the obligatory, irritating soundtrack. His best-known work, Bilitis (1977), is a barely palatable coming-of-age tale.

KEY QUOTE 'I didn't marry Emmanuelle to keep her to myself... I'm not jealous' - Jean

In the Realm of the Senses: Empire state

ALSO KNOWN AS Ai no korîda, L'empire des sens

DIRECTED BY Nagisa Oshima, 1976

STARRING Eiko Matsuda (Sada Abe), Tatsuya Fuji (Kichizo Ishida)

CERTIFICATION 18

RUN TIME 98 mins approx, Nouveaux Pictures

LANGUAGE Japanese

COVER QUOTE 'The expression of total passion' - The Times

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT Four years after hardcore Deep Throat, and two years after the soft-focus Emmanuelle, director Oshima distilled the desperation of sex for this exceptionally explicit arthouse movie. This version is available uncut though, crucially, one scene involving a very young child has been panned and scanned.

As the closing narration explains, Oshima based his film on a true story of a murderous affair which took place in Tokyo in 1936 and saw Sada Abe being treated as something of a folk hero in Japan. The insular complicity portrayed between the two protagonists means the film is not wholeheartedly moving but it is an extraordinary vision of sexual obsession.

THE PLOT Former prostitute Sada works in an inn, where she and another maid spy on the owner, Kichizo Ishida, and his wife having sex. When Sada is maligned as a whore she breaks into a furious row, which has to be broken up by Kichi. Kichi makes a pass at Sada when she is working and the two begin an affair, first in the inn and then visiting neighbouring hostels. At one, the couple stage a wedding celebration.

The couple become notorious with the staff at places where they stay for remaining confined in their rooms, barely eating but drinking and fucking all the time. Sada arouses Kichi's jealousy when she goes to visit a client while Sada herself becomes increasingly possessive of Kichi, threatening to cut off his penis if he ever has sex with his wife again.

The affair becomes more intense as the couple introduce strangulation into their intercourse. Sada strangles Kichi, apparently with his previous understanding, and then cuts off his penis. According to the closing vioceover, she wandered the streets of Tokyo gripping his dismembered member for four days before she was arrested.

THE FILM When Kichi first meets Sada she is wielding a knife. He lewdly implies she should be holding his penis instead and, for much of the rest of the movie, she is grasping one, the other, or both. Famously, a knife is finally applied to his penis, fatally.

In the Realm of the Senses opens with a scene of a homeless drunk being abused by some children. When Sada goes to his aid, he recognises her, claiming he used to visit her as a client. He begs one last encounter, offering to pay, and, momentarily, she takes his penis before being called away. There's an immediate sense of the power sex has over her and, perhaps, her own sexual power, which may have reduced this man to the gutter.

Sada is aware of her own attraction to sex and it is important for her, early in her affair with Kichi, to distinguish it from madness. 'I'm not sick,' she says; she's visited a doctor, showing the level of her concern: she's not a nymphomaniac, or any other tawdry diagnosis that might be applied, but 'hypersensitive'.

There is, also, an early indication of her propensity for violence: when she sees Kichi being shaved by his wife, Sada imagines taking the blade and attacking the woman. The scene which has been optically altered shows her tugging a small boy's penis, an image that would likely be deemed indecent under the Protection of Children Act.

Kichi is initially portrayed as a dissolute, if charming, drunk, prone to giggles and singing. He is fascinated by Sada's youth ('I'm no longer so young - how I envy you') and, as her madness grows, increasingly falls under her spell. He is the first to take her by the throat but the roles change as he says he can't bear to see her suffer. He allows her to throttle him with growing force for the pleasure it gives her (it is unclear if he is afforded any thrill beyond her enjoyment). Alongside some outdoor shots, these later scenes are some of the most beautiful in the movie as they achieve an almost mesmeric quality as she rides him in the throes of her orgasm.

Much of the film concentrates on his penis: it is shown erect, Sada fellates him or, at other times, holds a knife to it. When he wakes one morning, he finds her playing with it. 'Did you hold it all night,' Kichi asks. 'Of course.' 'It's as if he was yours,' he says later. 'He is.' Sada even has him piss inside her though, at another time, Kichi muses this is the only time his penis can rest. When they go home, she leads him by his penis and, of course, it becomes the focus of her threats: 'If I cut him off will you die?' 'Probably.' 'Then I don't want to.'

They do venture out, if only to go home or earn some money, and the outside world is an unwelcome visitor on their frolics. Maids criticise the state of their room - smell is especially important to Sada, while both partners enjoy the feel of each other's skin - encourage them to eat or, at least, to have less sex. They seem particularly shocked by Sada's continual willingness to suck Kichi's cock. At one point Kichi is warned, 'She'll end up killing you.'

By then, they are so wrapped up in their perpetual orgy, this prophecy is accepted as inevitable. Sada seems to achieve one incredible, final, orgasm at his death; in blood, she writes on her lover's body: 'The two of us, forever.'

KEY SCENES Chapter 2, 14:05 Kichi has Sada mount him at his home while she plays a musical instrument to cover for his wife. After sex she sucks his penis while he smokes a cigarette.

Chapter 3, 26:06 Sada and Kichi have sex in front of a group of women musicians. One of the women is deflowered by the others using a dildo carved in the shape of a bird before they all join in.

Chapter 4, 40:36 Kichi rapes the elderly madam of the inn where he and Sada are staying while Sada goes to visit a client, a school principal, to earn some money. She urges the ageing teacher to hit her, first across the face, then pinch her and pull her hair.

Chapter 5, 49:26 Sada 'lays' an egg that Kichi has inserted in her vagina, a surrealist image worthy of Georges Bataille. In his Story of the Eye (1928), protagonist Simone indulges in just such behaviour.

Chapter 7, 1:10:30 Sada urges Kichi to have sex with a 68-year-old woman, who pisses herself at the act's conclusion.

Chapter 8, 1:17:54 Kichi allows Sada to tie a belt around his neck which she tightens as they have sex.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT In the Realm of the Senses was critically acclaimed when it arrived at the 1976 London Film Festival, where it won the critics' prize. To avoid cuts, the film was shown in cinema clubs and was only first submitted to the BBFC in 1989.

The film was passed uncut for cinemas in 1991 - optical tinkering for that one scene notwithstanding - largely due to the wealth of critical opinion that had built up behind it. This would support a defence of artistic merit if any prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act was sought. (A friend who saw it at the time only said it confirmed her antipathy towards eggs.) Video/DVD release was officially achieved in 2000. (Virgin had released an uncertificated version in 1982 but it was withdrawn in 1984 when the Video Recordings Act became law; it demands BBFC approval for any release.)

Oshima went on to make such films as Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983), starring musicians David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto alongside director Takeshi Kitano, and Empire of Passion (1978), another eroticised telling of a true murder tale, from 1895, about a peasant woman and her younger lover, who conspire to kill the woman's husband. Afterwards they are pursued by his spirit and overcome with guilt.

KEY QUOTE 'Instead of a knife you should be holding something else' - Kichi

BONUS CURIO (1) To avoid prosecution in Japan while shooting, the film was listed as a French production and undeveloped footage shipped to France for processing and editing.

(2) When Oshima struggled to find anyone to play Sada Abe because of the controversial nature of the material his actress wife, Akiko Koyama, offered to take the role.

L'ennui: Adapt or die

DIRECTED BY Cédric Kahn, 1998

STARRING Sophie Guillemin (Cécilia), Charles Berling (Martin), Arielle Dombasle (Sophie)

CLASSIFICATION 18

RUN TIME117 mins, Artificial Eye

LANGUAGE French

COVER QUOTE 'A tale of enigmatic sexual obsession… dynamic and fascinating' - Time Out

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT I've always been underwhelmed by the work of writer Alberto Moravio, though much of it has been adapted for cinema, not least in The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) and Le mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963). What's astounding about this adaptation is how true it is to the source novel, La Noia (1960), down to the casting of the astonishing Sophie Guillemin, who stars opposite Gérard Depardieu in Jean Becker's trite My Afternoons with Margueritte (2010), which opens in UK cinemas this Friday. L'ennui was her film debut; she was nominated for the French film César awards for it and her follow up Harry, He's Here to Help (Dominik Moll, 2000) - both times in the most promising actress category.

THE PLOT Cruising a red light district, philosophy professor Martin spots an older man and a young woman fighting; the girl leaves and Martin discovers the man is a painter called Meyers. When Martin goes to visit Meyers in the latter's studio he is told Meyers died, while making love, and Martin encounters the woman, Cécilia. They begin a primarily sexual affair, exacerbated by Cécilia's infuriating calm and apparent lack of interest in anything but the most tangible experience ('I'm well so why worry about death') and Martin's jealousy, made worse when he discovers she is seeing an actor of her own age.

In the grip of breakdown, Martin takes sick leave from his job, and to dumping his news and emotions on his ex wife, Sophie. Finally, Martin starts giving Cécilia large amounts of money and asks her to marry him in an effort to preserve the relationship. She decides to leave on holiday with her boyfriend; Martin picks up a prostitute, imagining she is Cécilia, and crashes the car he is driving, with her in it. He wakes in hospital and asks the nurse to help him write a letter to Sophie in which he says he no longer has suicidal thoughts.

THE FILM Whole chunks of dialogue are lifted verbatim from the book La noia for the film L'ennui, and much more besides. Director Cédric Kahn does make a few tweaks, which I'll come to, but Sophie Guillemin, who was barely out of her teens when the film was made, is the absolute embodiment of Moravia's source novel.

In the book (I'll refer to Angus Davidson's translation for the New York Review Books version), the physique of her character, Cécilia, when first encountered, is described thus: 'She had a round face like a child; but it was a child that had grown too hastily and been initiated too soon into the experiences of womanhood. She was pale, with a slight shadow underneath her cheekbones which made her cheeks look hollow, and a mass thick, brown, curly hair all around her face. Her small mouth, childish both in shape and expression, reminded one of a bud that had withered prematurely on the bough without opening, and its corners were marked by two thin furrows... Finally her eyes, her best feature, were large and dark...'

The male narrator - Dino in the book, Martin onscreen - thinks she is no more than 15 years old (in the film she states explicitly that she is 17, though she has been in an affair for two years already) but is fooled by her figure, which he takes to be slender and childish but proves to be voluptuous. 'She had in fact a magnificent bosom, full, firm and brown, which did not, however seem in harmony with her torso - the slender, thin torso of an adolescent girl...' Guillemin mimics her walk, bosom thrust forward and belly pulled back, and the voice 'strangely expressionless, dry, precise'; she undresses, tramps on her skirt, even wipes herself vigorously with a towel after pissing, precisely as described by Moravia.

Martin's manner is immediately insistent with Cécilia, asking her extremely intimate questions, usually about her relationship with the painter Meyers. Martin is blunt: 'You don't seem to be the kind of woman to inspire a grand passion... to destroy a man.' Little does he know. Cécilia is impulsive in her attraction towards Martin: 'You're offering yourself as an object,' he tells her.

Cécilia is always ready for sex; she begins undressing the moment she enters his flat. 'Her only means of expression is sexual,' Martin complains to his ex wife. 'Sometimes, when she's lying there, legs apart, I find her cunt more expressive than her mouth.'

It is at the moment he decides to break with Cécilia that Martin becomes more interested in her: she misses an appointment for the first time, and it emerges she's seeing someone else. (There's a very strange scene where he follows Cécilia and her new boyfriend, Momo, almost under their noses; later he complains she didn't see him.) There is something of a dialectician manqué about Cécilia: when Martin asks her if she would continue to see him if he didn't have money she says she has already done so; she's not religious - 'If someone doesn't consider something then it doesn't exist.' Religion is, like so many other things, including aspects of her relationship with Meyers, dull, boring.

There are oddities in their romance: their last interaction is the first time we see them kiss passionately, otherwise Cécilia tends to just give Martin a peck on the cheek; they are only shown having straight sexual intercourse - when Martin picks up a prostitute who reminds him of Cécilia at the end of the film he demands a blow job. When he rings a man with whom he believes Cécilia is having an affair he demands: 'Does she give good head?' Her secrecy and infidelity are clearly not the only issues for Martin.

Kahn changes his central male character's profession from painter to philosophy professor - an alteration that gives some scenes the feel of Arnaud Desplechin's excellent Ma vie sexuelle (1996), including a very funny rant about Freud - and Dino's mother is replaced by an ex wife for Martin. As in Kahn's Red Lights (2004), adapted from the novel by Georges Simenon, it is the new scenes that sit least well in L'ennui, which is imbued with some of the thriller aspects of the other, later, film.

Finally it is Cécilia's apparent passivity that sends Martin mad: as they go to bed one afternoon he, deliberately, cruelly, asks her to first close the curtains, then a door, then to fetch his cigarettes, to check whether he's turned the gas off in the kitchen... It is played in the film exactly as described on paper. Sexually, Dino decides in the book, she 'had no feeling, and possibly even, no real sensuality, but merely a sexual appetite of which she herself was not entirely conscious although she submitted passively to its urgency.'

KEY SCENES Chapter 6, 27:21 Cécilia and Martin are seen having sex for the first time: she is shown in bed naked from behind, on top of Martin.

Chapter 9, 47:02 The couple have furious sex on the edge of the bed, this time with Martin on top. 'It was wonderful today,' says Cécilia, holding up three fingers to show the number of orgasms she had. Afterwards he ahs her again, standing up in the hallway.

Chapter 19 1:42:40 In a gaudy hotel room, the couple have sex for the last time in a variety of positions.

FURTHER VIEWING L'ennui is so fruitful due to the many other avenues of investigation it opens, not least those other adaptations of Moravia I mention at the beginning of this post, by Bertolucci and Godard. There are, too, those films featuring the remarkable Guillemin; Harry... is a very enjoyable film, German director Moll's best so far. Guillemin stands out as the best thing by far in My Afternoons... (originally titled La tête en friche), although there is a sense she may have been cast - as Depardieu's young lover - purely because of the sexual resonance with her character in L'ennui (it's very difficult to understand their relationship on any other terms).

There is, too, Red Lights, another dramatic depiction of male frustration, starring Jean-Pierre Darroussin and the icy Carole Bouquet. And, if you want to delve further into recent Simenon adaptations in a similar vein, you could check out Pierre Jolivet's In All Innocence (1998), starring Bouquet, again, alongside Gérard Lanvin, new favourite Guillaume Canet and the stunning Virginie Ledoyen (the last two going on to appear together in The Beach, 2000).

KEY QUOTE 'You're lying, that girl [Cécilia] doesn't exist!' - Sophie

Secretary: Assuming the position

DIRECTED BY Steven Shainberg, 2002

STARRING Maggie Gyllenhall (Lee Holloway), James Spader (E Edward Grey)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sexual theme, sex and language

RUN TIME 107 mins approx, Tartan

COVERLINE 'A comedy for everybody's who's been tied up at work'

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT Hanky spanky with Jake's sister Maggie, who is reported to be about to star in film Hysteria about the invention of the vibrator.

THE PLOT Lee Holloway is discharged from a psychiatric clinic and enrols in a typing course, where she excels. Her first job interview is with lawyer E Edward Grey; when she arrives his previous secretary is walking out and the office is in disarray. Grey immediately treats Lee as if she's always worked there and she gets the job. There is a connection between them and he soon notices that Lee cuts herself. Lee's father is an alcoholic, her boyfriend, Peter, ineffectual, and her mother sits in her parked car all day waiting to take Lee home again.

After a particularly charged telling off from Grey over her typing mistakes, he calls Lee into his office where he spanks her for the first time. She comes to crave his discipline - he specifies what she can eat at home, she crawls around the office and eats from his hand - but he is frightened by his own needs. He fires her - 'You have to go or I won't stop' - in a scene that mirrors her arrival at his office.

Lee accepts Peter's marriage proposal but, when trying on the wedding dress, leaves Peter's family home and runs to Grey's office. She stages what is portrayed by local media as a hunger strike at his desk; a priest and her father are among those who visit to try and persuade her to come to her senses. Grey finally succumbs after three days and rescues her from her protest; they have sex.

THE FILM All the films I've included here so far feature sexual intercourse but Secretary tackles an area of sexuality, S&M, in a relatively mainstream movie. Mary Gaitskill's short story is the starting-off point for an indie romcom, albeit with a twist, in the hands of director Steven Shainberg.

Lee is reluctant to leave the institution at the film's start, life inside is simple and she misses the structure it affords. It is the day of her sister's wedding, and the mores of smalltown life, which Lee and Mr Grey break, loom large. At the reception, however, Lee is forced to confront her father's alcoholism and it is not long before she breaks out her kit of sharp implements and starts cutting herself (and, even, burning herself on her thigh with a hot metal kettle).

There's an immediate passion between them; Grey doesn't act on it straight away but he does tell Lee to stop cutting herself: 'You're over that now.' He begins to question her about her private life and Lee throws away her kit but when Grey spots her with her fiancé his feelings are expressed in anger: he criticises her typing, the way she dresses, plays with her hair or taps a foot. The aggression leads to the first occasion he calls her into his office and spanks her; they both realise they have crossed a boundary (not for the first time, in his case).

Maggie Gyllenhall's expression throughout the scene is a lesson: there's pain, of course, emotional hurt, disbelief. As the beating becomes harder both are panting with effort and arousal; they're left in a daze at its conclusion and Lee takes Mr Grey's hand momentarily in hers in affirmation. Gyllenhall's performance begins as wonderfully ungainly, she's all legs and no grace, while James Spader overplays the simpering, nervous Grey at first but soon moves to confidence.

Lee embraces their new relationship but Grey is humiliated by it; he exercises relentlessly in an effort to overcome his urges. When they split up, Lee contacts other dominant/submissives but is unsatisfied by their often jokey demands. Sex with Peter is no better: the first time they sleep together she insists it must be in the dark and she keeps her clothes on. 'I didn't hurt you, did I?' Peter asks, when he's come. 'No,' she answers, disappointed.

Where the film itself perhaps disappoints is in its ending: Mr Grey and Lee become part of small town life. Oddly, Lee doesn't go back to work for him but the real cop out is in their sex life: they start having one. On the occasion when Grey beats her bare bottom and wanks over her back in his office, he assures Lee he won't fuck her; 'I'm not into fucking.' The cementing of their relationship, however, arrives when they have intercourse.

KEY SCENES Chapter 6, 46:50 After a moment of indecision, Mr Grey makes Lee bend over his desk, palms flat on the table, a misspelled letter in front of her. He begins to spank her, hard, slowly at first, and then more quickly.

Chapter 8, 1:09:42 Grey again orders Lee to bend over his desk, and this time to pull up her skirt and pull down her tights and pants. He masturbates over her back; Lee then goes to play with herself in the bathroom and makes herself come.

Chapter 11, 1:37:23 Grey bathes a naked Lee and they begin to make love.

FURTHER VIEWING When Edward Grey and his new bride go on honeymoon, one of their acts is tellingly familiar to a scene in Belle de Jour (1967). Lee is tied to a tree and they have sex; in Luis Buñuel's film, Belle (Catherine Deneuve) is famously taken into the woods and beaten while tied to a tree.

KEY QUOTE 'Miss Holloway: good letter' - E Edward Grey

BONUS CURIO Prior to the film's release in Britain, critic Tom Charity suggested to Gyllenhall in an interview in Time Out that her character should have had a shaven pubis. She agreed.

Shortbus: Searching for the Big O in NYC

DIRECTED BY John Cameron Mitchell, 2006

STARRING Sook-Yin Lee (Sofia), Paul Dawson (James), Lindsay Beamish (Severin), PJ DeBoy (Jamie), Raphael Barker (Rob), Peter Stickles (Caleb), Jay Brannan (Ceth), Justin Bond

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong real sex

RUN TIME 90 mins approx, Universal

COVERLINE 'Open your mind. And everything else'

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT As GQ proclaims on the DVD cover, 'The most sexually explicit film to go on general release.' And, if you've ever wondered about those Michael Flatley rumours, this is your chance to see the act of auto-fellation.

THE PLOT A variety of characters living in New York are connected by sex club Shortbus; as the city suffers a series of electrical 'brown outs' they're looking for more sex, happier relationships, or both. Sofia meets couple Jamie and James through her work as a therapist and they introduce her to Shortbus; there she meets dominatrix Severin and the pair agree to talk through their various problems.

After five years together, Jamie and James decide to open up their relationship and they meet Ceth at the club; neighbour Caleb is obsessed with James, whom he follows everywhere and photographs. After Caleb rescues James following a suicide attempt by the latter, all the characters regroup at Shortbus in a black out. A carnival-esque atmosphere breaks out.

THE FILM Shortbus is famed for putting real sex in a relatively mainstream picture - it touts itself as an 'E-XXX-tremely romantic comedy'. Certainly its reputation will have further spread with its availability on DVD. What is remarkable about this film is it's no-nonsense attitude to gay sex. Many of the other films featured in this blog, if they feature gay themes at all, are ambivalent in their attitude to homosexuality, if not downright homophobic. Even the lead character in Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell is antipathetic towards gay men: according to her, they don't look at women, which is not something I've ever heard before.

A little like Lucas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart, the characters in Shortbus are slightly damaged: Jamie can't seem to get over his past as a child actor; his partner James is a bipolar former hustler; Sofia, a sex therapist ('I prefer "couples counsellor"'), has never had an orgasm; her husband Rob behaves like a spoilt child; dominatrix Severin has never had a relationship; lovestruck Caleb is a stalker. The only well-balanced personality here is Justin Bond (of cabaret duo Kiki and Herb), playing himself as the manager of Shortbus; he's the sole likeable character among much therapy-speak and self-centred obsessionalism.

The film does sometimes feel a little close to it workshop roots: a game of truth or dare is a banal way to have characters reveal something of themselves. There are plenty of nice touches, though, not least the lovely animation of New York (by John Bair) that links the scenes, and the soundtrack by Yo La Tengo, which also features Scott Matthew, Anita O'Day and Animal Collective.

It soon becomes clear depressive James is preparing the way for suicide: he is opening up his five-year relationship with Jamie to secure a new partner for his boyfriend, as well as making a videotape of memories for Jamie. Resolution for Sofia, who has only ever slept with her husband, seems more difficult to pin down. Again like in A Hole in My Heart, Sofia tries vigorously to make herself come with a vibrator on the bathroom floor but is distracted by her husband, who is wanking to the internet next door. Attracted throughout by a couple at the club credited as 'beautiful couple' (they really are), Sofia is finally shown with them while Rob looks on.

There are big themes here: an elderly man who says he is a former mayor of the city consoles himself that he did all he could to contain the AIDS crisis, and one of the first shots of New York is of Ground Zero. Shortbus works best as a post-9/11 parable of a city powered by sexual energy. It also says, you may want or need to be in a relationship, it may just not be the right one.

KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 3:25 The central characters are introduced, having sex: Sofia and Rob are banging away on a piano; dominatrix Severin is flogging a preppie client, and James is sucking himself off on video.

Chapter 5, 35:00 Jamie, James and Ceth have sex together. When Ceth calls for a bit more noise, the trio breaks into the Star-Spangled Banner.

Chapter 10, 1:19:51 A counterpoint to the opening scene, where the realigned couples have sex, including Caleb and James, and Sofia on her own on a fantasy, lamp-lit shoreline.

FURTHER VIEWING The film James makes for Jamie in Shortbus feels and looks very similar to Jonathan Caouette's remarkable 2003 documentary Tarnation, which Mitchell executive produced. Caouette has assembled almost 20 years of home video footage, including Super-8 and even answering machine messages, chronicling his mother's depression and its effect on him. Their stories are shocking but the resulting film is very beautiful.

KEY QUOTE 'Voyeurism is participation' - Maitre d' at Shortbus

Deep Throat: The real thing

DIRECTED BY Gerard Damiano, 1972

STARRING Linda Lovelace ('as herself'), Harry Reems (Dr Young)

CERTIFICATION R18: Contains strong images of real sex, or fetish material, intended for sexual stimulation

RUN TIME 62 mins approx, Hot Rod

COVERLINE 'How far does a girl have to go to untangle her tingle'

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT In 2000, the BBFC relaxed its views on depictions of sex on screen, though not violence. This more adult perspective resulted in the release of a panned-and-scanned version of Deep Throat, easily available on the high street, and an R18 certificate for the original hardcore film, which is the one reviewed here.

THE PLOT (Such as it is) Famously, the character Linda Lovelace can't achieve orgasm and finds sex disappointing; the solution, as we all know, lies elsewhere. Initially Linda's flatmate, Helen, suggests they experiment with a series of men but, when this doesn't work, Linda visits Dr Young. He discovers her clitoris in her throat. Struggling to meet the twin attentions of his nurse and Linda, he casts the latter as his physiotherapist to look after some of his patients. Linda meets a man with a 13-inch penis who can satisfy her.

THE FILM Deep Throat was based around Linda Lovelace's felicity for the act with which she and the film have become synonymous but it does feature a broader range of sex acts than fellatio. The movie is graphic, and rubbish, but it became a rallying point for anti-censorship campaigners in the USA. I borrowed this copy from a gay American (male) friend for whom the film had sentimental value.

Deep Throat can be characterised as a hardcore musical, with bad lines between the sex scenes. The first such scene in the movie features a delivery man going down on Linda's flatmate, Helen, while she puffs on a cigarette. 'Mind if I smoke,' she asks the grocery boy, 'while you eat?' 'What's a nice joint like you doing in a girl like this?' asks a man who interrupts their orgy later. The sex scenes are accompanied by a kitsch soundtrack that takes the place of any live sound. A very graphic scene featuring Linda and Helen engaged in anal sex and a threesome, respectively, is accompanied by a song, 'Love is Strange'. 'Blowing Bubbles' is another theme.

Linda is portrayed as a sexual romantic: 'There should be more to sex than a lot of little tingles. There should be bells ringing, dams bursting, bombs going off.' 'Sounds like you want to wreck the city,' is her flatmate's sardonic response. When Linda meets Wilbur, who is in love with her, she tells him the man she goes out with has to have a nine-inch penis. 'I'm only four inches away from happiness,' he complains, before ringing Dr Young for help. The result is predictable: 'He can cut it down to any size you want,' Wilbur tells Linda. Their happiness is assured without the need for surgery.

KEY SCENES 27:11 Linda performs 'deep throat' on Dr Young, an event that is greeted with footage of bells ringing, fireworks exploding and a rocket launch.

34:15 Linda pays a house call, dressed in nurse's uniform, on Albert Fenster. To the accompaniment of a song called 'The Real Thing' he inserts a cup into her vagina and proceeds to drink Coke from it through a straw.

49:50 Linda is interrupted while shaving her pubis by another character, Wilbur Wang, who can only have sex if he sees it as a rape fantasy.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT 'It was the first time respectable, middle-class women went to porn theatres,' declares Camille Paglia at the start of Inside Deep Throat (2005) of what she calls this 'epical moment'. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's documentary is keen to establish Deep Throat's credentials as the 'most profitable film ever made' - from a $25,000 budget it went on to gross more than $600million, they claim - before exploring the censorship, and personal, issues that surround this hugely successful movie.

Screen sex began nine years after poet Philip Larkin's Annus Mirabilis: Deep Throat opened in the then-notorious Times Square, New York, on 12 June 1972. It was an immediate cause célèbre, dubbed part of the new 'porno chic' by no less an authority than the New York Times. As with Baise-Moi in France more recently, the religious right was particularly vociferous in its hounding of the movie. The film was closed down in New York and went on to being banned in a total of 23 states in the US but worse was to come: in 1973 the Supreme Court tightened US obscenity laws while in 1975 117 people connected to the film were charged with conspiracy.

Most prominent among them was one of the film's stars, Harry Reems, who became something of a poster boy for the anti-censorship brigade. Reems had originally been assigned to the film as a production assistant but his wacky central turn is one of the film's only redeeming features; he was paid $250 for the role but now faced five years in jail. Charismatic and a good deal more eloquent than Linda Lovelace, he was happy to debate the film and obscenity law publicly but was found guilty by a unanimous jury. He was saved from imprisonment by a typical legal sleight of hand when it was found, on appeal, that his participation in the film took place before the 1973 ruling.

Inside Deep Throat is a very well-formed look at three decades of censorship in the USA since the early 1970s, featuring many of the usual suspects: John Waters, Gore Vidal and Dr Ruth Westheimer (pity Dennis Hopper, who has to deliver the film's overwrought narration) - as well as that all important 'money shot'. The introduction of VCRs in the mid-70s is signposted as a crucial moment when DT director Gerard Damiano's vision of a mainstream, high-value sex film industry was pushed aside.

Links are also drawn from Nixon's 'moral leadership' to Ronald Reagan's attack on the porn industry in 1986; in both cases scientific opinion was ignored. A coda suggests that censorship would again be pursued more vigorously if officials weren't so busy combating terrorists. Inside Deep Throat is ultimately poignant: its protagonists, even the film's persecutors, are imbued with nostalgia.

Reems was passed over for any mainstream acting roles and turned to drink and drugs; he found himself through religion and qualified as a real estate agent. Linda Lovelace - originally Boreman - is portrayed as always eager to please; when the tide turned against pornography, she publicly denounced Deep Throat and said she had been coerced into appearing in it (certainly her mentor at the time, ex-partner Chuck Traynor, appears to have had an unhealthy hold over her). She struggled to hold down a regular job and decided, in her fifties, to cash in on her notoriety. She died in a car crash in 2002.

KEY QUOTE 'No wonder you can't hear any bells, you don't have a tinkler' - Dr Young

BONUS CURIO (1) Director Gerry Damiano was a hairdresser who was inspired to make porn movies by what he heard in his salon.

(2) Linda Lovelace had a cat called Adolf Hitler due to a black patch shaped like a moustache above its mouth.

Intermission: Enter the Void

For French director Gaspar Noé every ending is a beginning: his last film, Irreversible, begins at the end and is told backwards while this latest starts with the death of its lead character, from whose point of view we see the rest of the film. Oscar has invited to Tokyo Linda, the sister from whom he was split in childhood when their parents died in a car crash. Linda finds work as a stripper to supplement Oscar's income from drugs - and, it seems, as a gigolo to a friend's mum - but he's killed when a deal goes wrong.

Like Irreversible, Enter the Void is filled with strobe effects - Noé has no interest in courting an epileptic fanbase - a club with a bad name (The Void) and even a self-referential gag, where the director's name serves as a contact for a dealer. There's plenty of neon and fractals, a predominant breast fixation, as well as some guff about the Tibetan Book of the Dead that purports to serve as the film's philosophical frame. (I don't know what it is about Tokyo that sends Occidental directors bonkers: Sofia Coppola, Hal Hartley, Wim Wenders...)

I once described an author's role in one book as more like directing traffic, and there's something of that in Noé. He is undoubtedly technically very accomplished but much of his recent work is about the camera hitting its marks and orchestrating the cast to meet theirs; he's not someone to provoke great performances from his stars. All directors should be in control of their material, but the great ones have something to say, too. In Enter the Void, death is described as the 'ultimate trip' but highs are like dreams: you shouldn't share them with other people.

Lie with Me: Girls just wanna have fun

DIRECTED BY Clement Virgo, 2006

STARRING Lauren Lee Smith (Leila), Eric Balfour (David)
CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex, nudity and language
RUN TIME 89 mins approx, Metrodome

COVER QUOTE 'The continuing evolution of art porn' - Hollywood Reporter

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT In the last decade or so, hardcore porn has tried to extend its market by being more female friendly. In a mirroring of that situation, the artcore movie market is trying something similar with films like this.

THE PLOT At a party, Leila shares a bathroom with a guy, David, but ends up pulling someone else, with whom she has sex while David and his on-off girlfriend, Victoria, watch from a parked car, where they, in turn, have sex. Leila becomes obsessed with David; she exposes herself to him and then goes to his flat, where they have sex. They start to date but Leila's anxiety over the break-up of her parents' marriage, and the presence of Victoria, cause problems.

Leila flirts with other men at a club provoking David's jealousy; when they get home he sodomises her. David is then affected by the death of his father, for whom he acted as carer. David and Leila's relationship deteriorates; she has sex with someone else but is unfulfilled. When David sees Leila going to her cousin's wedding, he follows her and is invited to join the party.

THE FILM Lie with Me opens with a close-up of a woman's mouth; as the camera pulls further and further back, the main woman character, Leila, is revealed, pointing a TV remote control and only dressed in a short jean skirt, under which she's wanking herself. It's an absorbing image that doesn't quite succeed in its execution, much like this whole film.

Everyone in Lie with Me is annoying; it looks like a fashion spread, too, filmed in accentuated colours. Sex takes place on artfully arranged rugs; David's room has prints hanging on lines from the ceiling and a L'Atalante film poster on the wall (perhaps a visual pun on the respective directors' names?); when Leila comes to his place, she finds David posed on his bed in the middle of the room, reading Steppenwolf, as drapes blow in the sunlight behind him. If Cosmo did porn films, the result would be something like this (there are lots of condoms everywhere, too).

Scarlet magazine is quoted on the DVD cover saying that Lie with Me is 'everything 9 Songs wanted to be', a dreadful slur on the latter film, which is braver and more interesting in every way. The only area where this film goes further is that the couple at its centre have anal sex but, considering the detail in 9 Songs, you'd hardly expect it to go that far. For all Lie with Me's bluster about a woman trying to act like a man to get what she wants sexually, the anal sex scene is one of subjugation.

This DVD proudly proclaims that it is the 'full uncut UK version' - in BLOCK CAPITALS - but I can't find any record of it having been threatened with cuts in the UK, nor is the BBFC warning as explicit as some (no mention of 'real sex', for instance). The implication is that you're seeing something not afforded to cinemagoers (elsewhere in the world), though I don't think it had a full theatrical release here.

Leila's cousin, who's about to get married, wonders whether it's worth giving up great sex - with an ex - for love, with her fiancé; when David asks Leila whether they should go on a date, Leila replies that she's never been on one. Unfairly, she also asks David whether he has a girlfriend when she has his cock in his mouth, which may explain some of the confusion that ensues over their relationship status.

Lauren Lee Smith is very attractive as redhead Leila, even though the character's banal thoughts and fantasies, presented in voiceover, may want to make you kill yourself: 'Men can do whatever they want... they're not afraid'; 'How do you have sex with someone you're in love with?' Another mantra is 'Don't come'; I don't know how sexy that is.

If that doesn't do it for you, Eric Balfour will, and not in a good way. A desperately drippy presence, it's a relief that he doesn't voice his thoughts in his hopeless, girly voice. One sex scene is dominated by his ridiculous moustache, which is as neatly trimmed as Leila's pubic hair in another. David is supposed to have some depth, presumably, because he cares for his coarse father, though he could simply be under his thumb (David's girlfriend warns Leila, however: 'He has intimacy issues, he needs a mummy'). When Leila flirts and dances with two other men at a club, they appear even gayer than David.

Leila seems to find David as annoying as we do and it's something of a relief when they split up, when his father has died. The couple's superficial beauty is contrasted with the frail flesh of the father, who we see as much of naked as his son. (Leila only speaks with her own father on the phone when she's naked having a bath, which suggests she has issues all of her own.) She fails to deal with the idea that her parents are splitting up and selling the family home.

Lie with Me, which is based on a book by Tamara Berger, believes there is a desperate sexual connection at the heart of David and Leila's relationship, but Henry Miller or Anais Nin they ain't. If we relied on this level of heat in tempestuous couples, the world of art and literature would be a very sorry place. At the end of the film, David makes up with Leila. He admits, rather like 9 Songs' Matt, that he doesn't know where she lives, and perhaps they should get to know each other better. Considering he doesn't seem to have any personality, that would surely be the nail in the coffin for any prospective relationship.

KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 6:21 Leila blows a geeky guy outside a party; David and his girlfriend watch from a parked car. David's girlfriend goes down on him while Leila turns to face the car to have sex. David's girlfriend gets on top of him and Leila and David mimic each other's gestures while having sex with their respective partners.

Chapter 1, 14:25 Leila and David hide in a playground where he crawls into a large concrete tube. Leila follows him and undoes her dress to expose her left breast. When she touches herself, David puts his hand on his crotch but then leaves.

Chapter 2, 21:01 Leila goes to David's flat and starts to suck him off, then they have sex on the floor.

Chapter 7, 1:08:59 Leila picks up the geeky guy and goes back to his place; she forces his face into her crotch, then mounts him on the sofa.

Chapter 7, 1:11:28 Leila desperately tries to wank herself to orgasm while watching a porn film at home.

FURTHER VIEWING Lauren Lee Smith's performance stands alongside those of a couple of other strong women leads in two other recent movies: Kelly Reilly in Puffball (2007) and Elisabeth Röhm in Bernard Rose's The Kreutzer Sonata.

Puffball is the ageing Nicolas Roeg's perhaps valedictory piece, based on a Fay Weldon novel and scripted by her son, Dan. It features some extraordinary sex scenes - not necessarily in a good way, as they include internal shots of ejaculation. The Kreutzer Sonata (2008) shares with Lie with Me the belief that its central characters - Röhm plays alongside the mealy mouthed Danny Huston - are bound in a ferocious sexual tie. Reilly and Röhm are very watchable, though neither film does them any favours.

KEY QUOTE 'I know how to fuck and get what I want' - Leila

Battle in Heaven: Flag bearer

DIRECTED BY Carlos Reygadas, 2005

STARRING Marcos Hernández (Marcos), Anapola Mushkadiz (Ana), Bertha Ruiz (Marcos' wife)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong real sex

RUN TIME 94 mins approx, Tartan

LANGUAGE Spanish

COVER QUOTE 'Beautiful and utterly compelling. Carlos Reygadas makes films like no one else in modern cinema' - Esquire

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT Director Reygadas provoked controversy with his intergenerational sex scene in debut movie Japón (2002) which featured a non-professional cast. The posters for Battle in Heaven have the very beautiful Anapola Mushkadiz lying naked to her waist on a bed, which is surrounded by clouds. Much was made of the movie's 'real' sex scenes.

THE PLOT Marcos, a chauffeur for an army general, is sent to meet his employer's daughter, Ana, at the airport and takes her to the high-class, suburban brothel where she works. She tells him to come in for sex with one of her colleagues but it emerges that he wants to have sex with Ana. She spots that he is out of sorts and he admits that he and his wife kidnapped a baby who died. His wife fears that he will give everything away but Marcos promises Ana that he will give himself up to the police. Before he does so he visits Ana at her boyfriend's flat; Marcos leaves but then returns and stabs her. He joins a religious procession on his knees and has a sack placed over his head; blood emerges and he collapses in the Basilica.

THE FILM Despite visual and structural differences, Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven shares several themes with Y tu mamá tambien, by his Mexican compatriot, Alfonso Cuarón. Both films have an interest in the urban landscape of Mexico City - plenty of shots of its streets - sexuality and class, though only Reygadas goes so far as to explicitly mix the last two themes.

In Battle in Heaven's central scene, middle-aged chauffeur Marcos sleeps with his young charge, Ana, the daughter of his boss. Their relationship doesn't just transgress class and age boundaries but, as Ana points out, Marcos has known Ana for 15 years, since she was a child.

In the manner the camera sometimes goes for a wander in Cuarón's film, it does so here, scanning across neighbourhood rooftops, showing aerial repairmen at work, the city's skyline, and a dripping tap, before returning to the bedroom and a shot of the couple's genitals. The couple are tender with each other after sex: Ana's hand inches over to take that of the older man, her servant.

Reygadas had known Marcos Hernández, who plays Marcos, as he had worked as a driver for 30 years at Mexico's ministry of culture, where Reygadas' father worked. The thickset woman playing Marcos's wife, Bertha Ruiz, is the wife of a regional police commander. Her husband's only concern was that her sex scene be simulated. Reygadas is essentially transferring Catherine Breillat's filmic philosophy to central American and, indeed, extending it, through his casting of non-professionals.

The BBFC certificate for Battle in Heaven warns that it includes 'real' sex scenes and much of the pre-release hype focused on that. But the scenes, though more explicit than most in cinema (for instance, the blow jobs that bookend the film, or the shot of Ana's genitals), are not so explicit that they are definitely real. The BBFC ends up in a strange position here, advising viewers that convincing sex scenes are authentic, though they may be simulated (there's no reason a prosthesis couldn't be used for the blow job scenes).

There is a spiritual side to Reygadas' film that's more obvious than that in Y tu mamá también. When Marcos first sees the pilgrims whose procession he later joins, he is at a petrol station where the blaring classical music seems to have sent him into a fugue state. 'What do you think?' asks the mechanic, as he checks the oil. 'They're all sheep,' Marcos says. 'I was talking about the car,' comes the succinct reply.

Slowly Marcos' attitude changes: in bed with his wife he stares at a portrait of Jesus.
His wife urges Marcos not to give himself up but, if he is determined, to at least wait one more day so they can join the pilgrimage: 'Something special is going to happen,' she says, 'Something's going to change.' As it is, the extra day is the one on which he murders Ana, provoking a police hunt. Marcos' son reveals the location of the dead body of the baby that was kidnapped while his wife is taken to the procession to help spot her husband. (The policeman in charge of the operation looks and acts like a Mexican Takeshi Kitano, if you can imagine.)

When all the celebrants have left the Basilica, Marcos' wife is given permission to enter first to find her husband. Her husband's body is kneeling in a pew, a blood-soaked bag over his head. She reaches out to touch his shoulder and his body slumps to the floor. It starts to rain, and the next scene is of men trying to ring the massive church bell, though no sound is heard on the soundtrack.

This is followed by a recurrent scene in the movie, of soldiers either raising or lowering a giant Mexican flag, a ceremony Marcos has followed religiously in the past. It is accompanied by loud military music, and other scenes have very loud music, for instance Bach at the garage or Tavener's The Protecting Veil. It serves as jolting a purpose as the voiceover in Y tu mamá también.

It's possible to think of the opening scene, where Ana fellates Marcos, as Marcos' fantasy. Its repetition at the film's end hints at something else made manifest - a meeting in heaven, or Marcos' dying dream?

KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 00:40 A sweaty, middle-aged man, Marcos, with a combover and paedo glasses is shown getting a blow job from an equally naked young woman, Ana, against a grey backdrop. The camera tracks down his standing body and then round her kneeling figure till we're facing her; a tear trickles down one cheek.

Chapter 7, 37:07 Marcos is shown having sex with his hefty wife from behind. As she kneels on the bed he regards her back and an icon of the wounded Christ on their bedroom wall.

Chapter 9, 48:18 Ana is riding Marcos naked in bed; as they have sex the camera moves out the window and tacks across the skyline before returning to the couple. She gets off him and, as they lie side by side, the camera shows her pussy.

Chapter 15, 1:29:36 Ana is again shown giving Marcos a blow job in the space with the grey backdrop. Both are noticeably more relaxed and happier; they say that they love each other.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT Reygadas went on to make the beautiful, mystical Silent Light (2007), set among the Mexico's Mennonite community. A fan of Carl Theodor Dreyer's work from his time as a potential film student in Brussels, Reygadas borrows the ending to the Danish director's film Ordet (1955). There are again the everyday sex scenes he likes to show, amidst another cast of non-professionals.

KEY QUOTE 'What you really want is to fuck me, right, Marcos?' - Ana

BONUS CURIO (A Brush with Nipples, Part III) Mushkadiz's hair extends wildly for the cover of the US DVD (in the UK, the film's title was emblazoned over her chest):