Anatomy of Hell: Bataille in heaven

DIRECTED BY Catherine Breillat, 2004
STARRING Amira Casar, Rocco Siffredi
CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sexual detail and strobing effects
RUN TIME 77 mins approx, Tartan
LANGUAGE French

COVERLINE 'WARNING: THIS FILM CONTAINS SCENES WHICH MAY OFFEND' (IN CAPITAL LETTERS)

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Director Catherine Breillat started writing explicit novels at the age of 17 (L'homme facile); in 1999, she cast porn star Rocco Siffredi in his first mainstream film. Romance tells the story of a young woman teacher who, unhappy in her relationship, meets a man (Siffredi) with whom she explores ever more extreme sexual experiences. In the succeeding years Breillat directed such well-received, provocative, fare as A ma soeur (2001) and Sex is Comedy (2002). After a gap of five years, this is her return to working with Siffredi in a role she wrote specially for him, based on her novel Pornocratie.

THE PLOT A man goes down on another man outside a gay club. Inside, 'the woman', as she is referred to, is approached by a man but brushes him off; she goes to the toilet, bumping into another man on the way (Siffredi). In the toilet, 'the woman' slits her left wrist with a razor; 'the man' finds her and takes her to a pharmacy. Afterwards she goes down on him in the street; she makes him a work proposition: he is to come and visit her in her home and watch her explore herself sexually.

The proposal takes place over four nights and, from initial observer, he is soon drawn into sex with her and stays until morning. On the last day he accepts payment from her and leaves her wallowing in her own waste, he says. In a bar, he shares his woes with another drinker. When 'the man' returns to the house he finds it deserted and the bed dismantled. He pictures himself pushing the woman off the cliff into the sea.

THE FILM A stern, written notice at the beginning of Anatomy of Hell says: 'A film is an illusion, not reality-fiction or a happening. It is a true work of fiction. For the actress's most intimate scenes, a body double was used. It's not her body, it's an extension of a fictional character.' Presumably this was placed at the request of the actress, Amira Casar, but it provokes a host of questions, not least why Breillat didn't use an actress who was willing to appear without a body double.

The scenes are extremely intimate but the owner of the female genitalia shown in close-up (having a finger inserted or expelling objects; more of that later) is named: Pauline Hunt (unless this is some form of rhyming slang). These may not be Casar's bits, but they nevertheless belong to someone, and Breillat has taken a decision to show them unflinchingly.

There's no such coyness about Siffredi, whose erect penis is shown several times; a seasoned porn star, his inclusion is also nonetheless initially puzzling. His character is gay so you might assume there would be little sexual activity between them that requires Siffredi's experience to come into play. 'The man's' sexuality is never referred to directly, 'the woman' uses such euphemisms as 'you people' or simply the plural 'you'.

Despite its voyeuristic premise, Anatomy of Hell is a very talky movie, perhaps predictably for a novelist. The characters speak in sweeping statements and many of them feature male stereotypes of women, as well as straight women's stereotypes of gay men ('People like you don't look at women,' she says early on). The man is horrified by women's bodies: their colour, the lips, the form, sweat; he compares shaved skin to that of a plucked chicken and, even less favourably, to a frog.

The first night he visits her, wearing a white suit, he complains about the cost - for which he will be recompensed - of visiting her isolated coastal home. The bedroom set where most of the action takes place reminds me of something from a sketch by Paula Rego or de Chirico; the raging sea outside is pure Hitchcock or Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. 'Why do you exhibit yourself this way?' he asks. 'The fragility of female flesh inspires disgust or brutality,' she opines in (a form of) response.

Breillat provides a voice-over to the film that elides into 'the man's' point of view. There are two scenes of childhood, strongly influenced by Georges Bataille: in the first, a boy climbs a tree to feed worms to some freshly hatched birds, which later remind him of the flesh and look of a vagina in its nest. The boy carefully places one of the chicks in his shirt pocket but on the climb back down it is is killed; he throws it on the ground and stamps on it. In the second memory, a young girl strips and lies down in exactly the pose from Marcel Duchamp's Etant donnés; the boys with her insert the arm of some spectacles into her vagina and pull it out bearing her 'slime', as 'the man' sees it.

Over the course of their transaction, the couple's relationship changes: when he arrives the second night, she has dressed up, in black, from the previous white, and done her hair, though he immediately strips her and undoes her hairclip (the red of the room prefigures her menstruation; he wears a cross); on the third night he finds the house unlocked and is protective ('Anyone could have come in').

After the couple have sex for the final time, 'the man's' penis is covered in blood when he withdraws. It is so bloody, the scene is reminiscent of the male dismemberment in Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses. While it seems like an emasculation, a drawing together of both of them, the couple discuss the significance of the blood: 'Man can't give life,' he says; 'He gives death and so gives eternal life,' she responds.

'The man' goes to a bar and gets drunk; he has a discussion about the relationship that is a parody of heterosexual male conversations: She's a slut, the Queen of Sluts. Hump as many as you can, replies his drinking partner, like goats. In the age-old fantasy, the right sex has seemingly set him straight. Back at the deserted house, the only trace he finds of their relationship is a folded, blood-stained sheet, as if 'the woman' knew 'the man' would be back, and has left him this memento.

KEY SCENES Chapter 6 27:31 'The man' puts his finger in 'the woman's vagina (shown in detail) before removing it and examining the traces on his digit. She gets the giggles.
Chapter 8 33:15 As 'the woman' sleeps, 'the man' parts her thighs from behind and paints first her labia (lips) and then her anus with a lipstick, creating a gaudy mouth, before applying it to her face.
Chapter 9, 35:24 Again, as she lies apparently asleep, he has sex with her from behind.
Chapter 11, 46:40 'The man' goes to the garden and chooses a three-pronged wooden rake. When he returns to the room, he inserts its handle between the legs of the sleeping woman.
Chapter 12, 52:56 'The woman' pulls a tampon out of her vagina. She dangles it like a dead mouse, then drops it into a glass of water like a teabag. The man and woman drink from the glass.
Chapter 13, 58:58 'The woman' pushes a stone dildo out from her vagina (this is shown in close up). 'The man' wanks her with it before they have sex.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT Breillat's latest films are less explicit but no less powerful: The Last Mistress (2007) features the wonderful Asia Argento (and includes Casar in the cast), and there have been two fairytale adaptations, reminiscent of the work of Angela Carter, Bluebeard (2009) and Sleeping Beauty (2010). Siffredi has returned to porn, where he is prolific, notably in his own 'Animal Trainer' and 'Puppet Master' series.

KEY QUOTE 'You talk too much' - 'The man'

BONUS CURIO (or, A Brush with Nipples Pt II) As has happened elsewhere, Casar's appearance undergoes slight changes for Anatomy of Hell's DVD cover image in different territories, from having a breast exposed (below, as it is in the relevant scene in the film) to being covered with a nightdress (top). My, UK, version has her naked, but with a nipple airbrushed away, unnervingly.

Intermezzo: Room in Rome

Julio Medem's most recent film, Room in Rome, is being released in the UK on DVD by Optimum on 18 October. It stars Elena Anaya (from the same director's Sex and Lucía) and Natasha Yarovenko as two women who meet in the Italian capital and spend the night together.

There's something here about the tales we tell each other and how we also use the internet to either support or check our truths and fabrications. (Apart from WiFi, the couple's only contact with the outside world is singing night porter Max, who's keen to join in their bedroom antics if he can.)

This is a small piece for Medem, but there are again hints of his favourite - coincidence - some Basque influence, and a lot on art and mythology (myth-making). The leads are very beautiful and, though the English-language dialogue is somewhat clunky, the final effect oddly likeable. It would be good to see Medem back on a bigger canvas soon.

Irreversible: Back to hell

DIRECTED BY Gaspar Noé, 2002
STARRING Monica Bellucci (Alex), Vincent Cassell (Marcus), Albert Dupontel (Pierre)
CERTIFICATION 18: Contains very strong violence, sexual violence, sex and language
RUN TIME 97 mins approx, Tartan
LANGUAGE French

COVER QUOTE 'One of the most important films in the last 20 years of movie history' - Dazed & Confused

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT It's told in reverse. It stars Monica Bellucci. She gets anally raped. Oh.

THE PLOT Irreversible begins with its end credits, rolling down the screen before they skew to the side.

1. Blue lights flash on the outside wall of a building and the camera flies into a room where Philippe Nahon, the butcher from Noé's Seul contre tous (1998), is sitting naked on a bed. He's regaling another man with his crime: 'I slept with my daughter. She was so cute.'

2. They're distracted by sirens arriving at the club downstairs which, we're told, is called the Rectum. A man, Marcus, is wheeled out on a stretcher, his shoulder strapped up. Another man, Pierre, comes out with the police; he's told he'll likely get 10 years in jail for what he did.

3. Marcus and Pierre enter 'felching fuck club' the Rectum looking for a man called Tenia, a type of tapeworm. Various acts are being performed in the club, including blow jobs, beatings, anal sex and fisting, which the two men are asked to participate in. Marcus finds someone who may be Tenia and attacks him with a bottle; Tenia throws Marcus to the ground and breaks his arm. Pierre grabs a fire extinguisher and beats Tenia's head to pulp.

4. Marcus is driving a taxi to the area where the Rectum is supposed to be; when Pierre tries to leave in the cab, Marcus smashes the car's windows. Pierre is screaming insults at Marcus, saying he must think of Alex in hospital.

5. Marcus throws a cab driver out of his taxi.

6. Pierre and Marcus are interrogating prostitutes in the company of two hoods; Marcus attacks a transsexual prostitute who admits he saw what happened: the man they want is called Tenia, and can be found in the Rectum.

7. Pierre is in a daze in the back of a police van, being interrogated. In the street he and Marcus are accosted by two local gangsters who say they will help them get revenge.

8. Coming out of an apartment block, Pierre and Marcus see a woman, Alex, being lifted into an ambulance on a stretcher. Her face is a bloody mess.

9. Alex exits the apartment block and tries to hail a taxi; she's advised to use the underpass to cross the road. It's here she is raped in a drawn-out scene, described below.

10. Marcus is making fun of Pierre at the party; with two women they go into a bathroom, where Marcus takes some coke and kisses the women. Alex is with a pregnant woman friend, telling her it's a special day. Marcus is obviously off his face and Alex tells him she wants to leave.

11. It becomes clear Pierre is Alex's ex; on the way to the party, on the Metro with Alex and Marcus, Pierre tries to get the couple to describe their sex life.

12. Alex and Marcus are shown in bed; Alex tells Marcus she dreamt of a red tunnel split in two. She tells Marcus her period is late but he says he would be pleased if she was pregnant. They play around together (Marcus puts Etienne Daho's cover of Edith Piaf's Mon manège à moi on the stereo) and Marcus tells Alex he wants to fuck her arse. He goes to buy a bottle before the party, she takes a shower and then a pregnancy test. Her reaction implies it is positive.

13. The final scene shows her lying in the gardens outside the flat, where children are playing in a sprinkler's spray.

THE FILM Despite a grudging admiration for Seul contre tous, I avoided Irreversible when it first came out in the cinema. I succumbed to review a special DVD edition for Little White Lies magazine but continue to be perplexed by the popularity of this movie: why would you want it in your home?

Irreversible answers a simple question: how do you end a rape drama on a happy note? Tell it backwards. Noé is a virtuoso technician and Irreversible shows off his talents to their full, though the film is not exactly backwards, rather its scenes are shown in reverse order. How seriously, though, do you take a film involving a search for a character named after a tapeworm in a place called the Rectum?

The film's politics are defiantly unreconstructed: 'Blood calls for vengeance,' two gangsters say. 'This is a man's business.' Sam Peckinpah examines a man's quest for revenge when the character's wife is raped in Straw Dogs (1971); Noé's associates Despentes and Trinh Thi posit an equally bloody female response in Baise-Moi.

Here, it is Pierre who boils over and smashes Tenia's head to pieces. Pierre has tried to hold Marcus back: Marcus goads Pierre over his apparently asexual life since Alex left him - is he gay? Homophobia is rife throughout the film; when we do see gay men, in the Rectum, they are extreme caricatures (none tries to stop Pierre killing Tenia, there is even some applause).

To Pierre, Marcus is an animal; this, it turns out, is why Alex is drawn to the latter. Pierre could be a typically neurotic, if uncharacteristically explicit, Woody Allen character; he tells a self-deprecating story how the one time Alex cried out during sex she had banged her head on some furniture. When Pierre quizzes the couple on their sex life, Alex says Pierre was too considerate with her, an altruist, she wants a man who takes his pleasure with her (as, Noé could be saying, the rapist does).

Tenia, Alex's rapist, is encountered with a transsexual; during his assault Tenia makes clear that he wouldn't normally fuck a woman. He berates Alex for being rich - she has dressed up for the party - and punishes her for being beautiful. (We have no idea what she or Marcus does, though Pierre is mocked for being a philosophy teacher, whether literally or not is unclear.)

If the film's moral is stated at the end - ie the beginning - it perhaps lies in Nahon's butcher's philosophy: 'Gotta fight, gotta live. Go on fighting, go on living.' At the beginning - the end - Noé underlines the possibility of Alex's pregnancy by twice showing a poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey featuring a floating foetus. The film closes with a scene of picture-perfect tranquility. It is said Noé used a 27 hertz tone in the film's soundtrack to induce nausea in viewers (the score is by Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter). At the end, you may well feel sick.

KEY SCENE Chapter 10, 42:54 Alex walks down the underpass and sees a couple fighting. The man beats the woman and, when Alex passes, he grabs her. He pulls a knife on her and forces her to the ground. He holds her mouth shut and anally rapes her while all the time spouting threats and obscenities. (In case we don't get the point, Noé added a CGI penis to the assailant in post-production.) The scene lasts some time; when he finishes Alex tries to crawl away but he begins to kick her head. He then grabs her, punches her many times and pummels her face into the ground.

FURTHER VIEWING Noé's new film, Enter the Void, opens this Friday, 24 September, and includes a sex scene from inside the vagina, reminiscent of Nic Roeg's dire Puffball (2007). Noé is said to be working on an 'erotic love' movie next.

THE QUOTE 'Time destroys everything' - End caption

BONUS CURIO Noé collects posters for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is presumably where the image used near the end of Irreversible comes from.

Import Export: Human traffic

DIRECTED BY Ulrich Seidl, 2007

STARRING Ekateryna Rak (Olga), Paul Hoffman (Pauli), Michael Thomas (Michi)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong real sex and very strong language

RUN TIME 135 mins approx, Trinity

LANGUAGE German, Russian & Slovakian

COVER QUOTE 'Jaw-dropping… This extraordinary film makes everything else around look comfy and pedestrian' - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT An unsentimental drama contrasting economic prospects for central Europeans a generation after the end of the Cold War.

THE PLOT Olga, an underpaid children's nurse in the Ukraine, tries to supplement her wage in the online porn industry. Pauli, a Viennese security guard, loses his job after he's assaulted by a group of young men and has to turn to his step-father, Michi, for help finding work. Olga moves to Austria, where she goes through a series of jobs, including an unpleasant period as a nanny; when she finds work as a hospital cleaner, Olga is tormented by one of the nurses after she starts to befriend and care for some of the patients. Pauli ends up distributing gaming machines in the former Yugoslavia with Michi; Michi chats up women in front of his step-son and tries to have sex with a prostitute with Pauli watching. Pauli leaves in disgust; at first he tries to find a job at the local market, then he starts hitchhiking.

THE FILM There is no sex in Import Export, despite the blandishments of the certification, but other forms of sexual activity reduced to the status of financial transaction. The female protagonists of Import Export are made to display themselves for male clients, while responding to their every command.

Austrian Ulrich Seidl can afford to be unsentimental in Import Export; Olga gets the giggles when her friend Tatjana gives her a crib sheet of useful German phrases when working on the web. The framing of the scenes is reminiscent of Roy Andersson's You, the Living, which features some very funny sex scenes with a skinny, older man and a large woman, but there's none of that humour here.

Olga and her 'western' counterpart, Pauli, suffer contrasting humiliations: Olga has to put up with the barked instructions of a viewer she doesn't understand ('Nearer, finger, ass!' some of his single-word demands); Pauli is stripped near-naked by a gang in the basement car park of the shopping mall where he works (it is implied that his assaulters are not native Austrians). Later, a prostitute is led like a dog and forced to bark by Pauli's step-father with less ceremony than she's asked to have sex with both men.

In Austria, a woman undergoes a humiliating mock job interview, though she emerges triumphant, to the viewer's pleasure; Olga has to learn how to brush the teeth of stuffed dead animals for another job. She is afforded no personal space, as her compatriots are forced to expose their every orifice. Despite being bullied at the hospital where she finally finds cleaning work, she achieves some camaraderie with her colleagues; Pauli finds he is best off alone.

KEY SCENES Chapter 5, 18:30; 22:58 Olga visits her friend Tatjana, an internet sex worker. Olga watches women playing with themselves on camera at the beck of German-language subscribers.

Chapter 24, 1:49:20 Pauli walks into Michi's hotel room in Slovakia to find a semi-naked prostitute crouched on all fours on the floor. Michi is still fully dressed, including wearing his winter sports jacket. Pauli wants to borrow money from his step-father but Michi insists that they both have sex with the woman; finding no other way out of the situation, Pauli encourages Michi to have sex with her, which his step-father fails to do.

FURTHER VIEWING At around the same time as Import Export, Belgium's wonderful Dardenne brothers tackled the brutal trade of human trafficking from eastern Europe in The Silence of Lorna (2008) but both they and Ulrich Seidl were preempted by Lucas Moodysson. The Swede's Lilya 4-Ever (2002) is a pure-black depiction of the trade starring Oksana Akinsjina as Lilja, who says she is 16.

Lilja is deserted in an unnamed former Soviet Union country when her mother leaves for the United States with a new boyfriend. Lilja leaves school and is thrown out of her flat by an aunt, who relocates her to a dirty, decrepit apartment that's recently been vacated when its occupant, an old man, died. The flat is in the state he left it, she's told; her only friend is a boy, Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky), who plays basketball with any rubbish he can find and sniffs glue. 'I must get out of here,' Lilja says. 'Anything but this.'

When the electricity is cut off, and with her money running out, Lilja begins to dabble in prostitution, picking up clients at a club she was introduced to by a friend who wanted to make extra pocket money (Lilja's aunt tells her: 'Do what your mother did: go into town and spread your legs'). Lilja is shown some kindness by a young man, Andrei, who promises to take her to Sweden; she goes ahead, alone, is raped by Andrei's contact, and forced into prostitution.

Moodysson is circumspect in showing the sexual crimes inflicted on her (a series of men's faces at the same party shot from her point of view, for instance). Left behind, Volodya, kills himself; when Lilja intends to commit suicide, Volodya's spirit comes (wearing angels' wings) and beseeches Lilja not to do the same ('This life is the only one you've got,' he pleads) but she does so anyway.

At every point, when you think things can't get worse, Lilja's life plumbs further depths (her mother writes to social services from the United States, trying to revoke her guardianship, adding that her daughter was never wanted). The film is a tour de force, notable for stand-out performances from its two, young, leads.

KEY QUOTE 'I can hire you and fire you, that's how it is in this country' - One of Olga's Austrian employers

A Hole in My Heart: Blessed be the pornographers

DIRECTED BY Lucas Moodysson, 2004

STARRING Björn Almroth (Erik), Sanna Bråding (Tess), Thorsten Flinck (Rickard), Goran Marjanovic (Geko)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex, sex references and surgical images

RUN TIME 93 mins approx, Metrodome

LANGUAGE Swedish

COVER QUOTE 'Moodysson's most radical and daring film to date' - The Guardian

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Swedish director Moodysson delves into the world of homemade porn.

THE PLOT Teen Erik lives at home with his father, Rickard, who's making a porn film in the living room, with friend Geko and wannabe star Tess. Erik is a loner who stays in his room listening to industrial music on his headphones and keeps pet earthworms; the others encourage Tess to have sex with him, but slowly the two form a tentative friendship. The porn shoot becomes increasingly extreme as the three protagonists spend time in each other's company and drink more; after filming one particularly violent scene, Tess runs away. When she returns she brings some food with her; the dinner that follows descends into pandemonium, an atmosphere that's little helped when Geko later lets slip a secret from Rickard's childhood.

THE FILM From the despair Moodysson plumbs in Lilya 4-Ever (2002), you may be surprised to hear that the director offers some hope in A Hole in My Heart, especially as it features many graphic and disturbing scenes. The assault begins immediately with loud bursts of static noise and clips of organs, objects being inserted into various orifices and other close-ups (eyes and skin, often). It's a confusing montage whose contents gradually reveal themselves throughout the movie but, if you're going to stick with A Hole, you can't say you haven't been warned.

Broadly, Moodysson draws parallels here between the need for attention of amateur porn stars and Big Brother contestants; these are wounded people trying to live up to a sexualised image of the world they've bought into. Characters talk to camera and step into a wardrobe, as if to enter the famous BB diary room. Tess has been turned down for the TV show but is happy to do anything to appear in a porn film; she boasts of having had an operation to have her labia reduced, and many of the surgical clips show just that procedure. This was some time before the furore over Lars von Trier's Antichrist.

Latterly it becomes clear that some of the images we've seen, of plastic figures being pushed into a vagina or anus, feature a latex sex toy and not a real person. Action Man- and Barbie doll-type figures are used to illustrate some of the scenes, including sex between Tess, Rickard and Geko, though the real thing is shown as well. Tess is seen frantically trying to make herself come too, alone on the bathroom floor.

From the experimental, industrial music that son Erik listens to on his headphones, the soundtrack often jarringly switches to upbeat pop, as if the porn shoot were an MTV-style reality soap. (A noose hangs in the middle of Erik's room and on the window is a paper cross.) At one point the characters start playing football in the flat, an ironic take on the happy family scene at the end of Moodysson's Together (2000).

In an attempt to bond with his son, Rickard sets up a shooting target in the flat using a centrefold of a naked woman, her head replaced by the bull's eye; Rickard and Geko fire air rifles at the model's breasts and vagina until there is nothing left but black gaps. Dressed in a mask and motorcycle helmet the two men confront Tess for a scene in their porn film, until she escapes from the flat, taking her belongings with her.

Erik says that his earthworms will transform into butterflies; when Geko falls asleep in the scene of double penetration, he dreams of UFOs and corn circles. When Tess runs away, she collapses in a supermarket car park. Real-life is not enough for her: 'Everyone's so boring out there,' she complains, 'people are so ugly.' (Earlier on, she has read out a list of different types of cosmetic surgery to camera; idiosyncratically, there's also a discussion of the repercussions of education policy later.)

Famously, Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove was supposed to have a ended with a custard pie fight in the war room between the various heads of states; A Hole in My Heart climaxes with a particularly graphic food fight which, along with the revelation that Rickard suffered abuse as a child from his father, Erik's grandfather, provides catharsis. The characters break out of the confines of the flat and, for pretty much the first time, we see the sky. Tess and Erik play a morbid game where they try and fit themselves into laundrette drying machines, this time more like something from Jackass. There is finally laughter, though for many viewers it may come too late.

KEY SCENES Chapter 4, 23:01 Geko, Rickard and Tess take part in a threesome on Rickard's fold-out bed. The action is foregrounded by a demonstration using children's action figures. During the scene, bluntly titled 'DP' on the DVD, Geko dreams that he's fallen alseep; when he wakes up he discovers he was asleep, much to Tess's amusement and Rickard's anger.
Chapter 7, 41:04 Tess makes herself up and dresses for the filming of another scene; when the men come out their faces are masked and they're wielding a baseball bat. At first verbal threats are made and then the scene becomes increasingly dark; when Tess is physically threatened she gets up and leaves.
Chapter 10, 1:04:56 Food is sprayed around the flat and over the three characters involved in filming the porn film; snacks, and even washing up liquid, are stuffed and poured into Tess's mouth. Geko pees into a wine glass he says he will make her drink; he is then sick into her mouth.

FURTHER VIEWING Moodysson's earlier work is surprisingly heartwarming and may come as welcome relief following A Hole in My Heart and its extremely bleak predecessor, Lilya 4-Ever. Fucking Amal (released here as Show Me Love, 1998) is the story of a gay girl trying to get by at school; it's unromantic, but uplifting nonetheless, boasting tremendous central performances from Alexandra Dahlstrom and Rebecka Liljeberg. It's easy to remember Together for the climactic, snowy football kickabout which bonds the film's cast of disillusioned hippies, split families and wounded children.

After A Hole in My Heart, Moodysson continued his move from art-house cinema into film-making that is more appropriate for the art gallery with Container (2007). A woman and a fat man fool about onscreen in black and white. Don't bother.

KEY QUOTE 'You don't like women, that's the thing' - Erik

BONUS CURIO Moodysson claimed in an interview with the Guardian that a Swedish couple was caught having sex in a cinema in during a screening of A Hole in My Heart, which seems unlikely. He sounds heartened by the prospect.

The gasman cometh: a belated introduction

In the coldest part of last winter, when it was snowing, the boiler in my flat died. When the repairman came to replace it, I went out for part of the day to avoid the noise and disruption. On my return, the job had been completed and he was eager to be on his way.

Home early, with little to do, I thought I may as well watch a DVD, but then noticed that my various stacks of films had been moved: some discs were gone. I could see that Sex and Lucía was missing, but couldn't work out what the others might be. I rang the boilerman and asked if he happened to have seen any of my DVDs, but could hardly accuse him of theft.

It was clear that the films he'd taken all featured fairly strong sex - I've since discovered the others included Baise-Moi and Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell. It got me thinking about how sex on mainstream DVD has become more explicit, and how we're more likely to have these films in our homes. HMV, for instance, will group many of these, often art-house, films together on its display shelves, some for as little as £3. The message would seem to be, you may not be a porn buyer, but here's something fairly strong, if not hardcore, that's acceptable to take home.

At university, I did a dissertation on obscenity law, notably in cinema, and I am interested in how attitudes have changed since the big arguments over censorship, such as the controversies over the book of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960) or the film Last Tango in Paris (1972). Outrage is as big a sell as ever, but now the film certificates ('strong real sex') seem as much a part of the marketing.

The films here did not all cause controversy, nor were that many censored, but they are part of the process that allows us to freely buy DVDs featuring hardcore sex (Baise-Moi) or genital mutilation (Antichrist) on the high street and watch them at home. The films I've chosen are all available on DVD (details refer to UK editions for the most part) and these posts are the building blocks to a longer essay I want to write, updating my original thesis.

NB There be spoilers throughout!

The usual note: if any picture infringes your copyright, please let me know and I'll remove it immediately.