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.

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.

Y tu mamá también: Mexican road trip

DIRECTED BY Alfonso Cuarón, 2001

STARRING Maribel Verdú (Luisa), Diego Luna (Tenoch), Gael García Bernal (Julio)

CERTIFICATION 18: Frequent strong bad language, some strong sex/nudity, drug use

RUN TIME 101 mins approx, Icon

LANGUAGE Spanish

COVER QUOTE 'Without doubt the sexiest movie you'll see this year' - Uncut

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Y tu mamá también was intended to be sexually provocative: a booklet included with a special DVD release in the UK explains that the president of production at Good Machine films, Ted Hope, approached Cuarón to take part in their 'Uncensored' project, to make explicit movies classified NC-17 in the States. 'In the process we wondered if we were explicit enough or if we needed to go further, something that we realised went against the nature of the characters and story,' the director notes.

THE PLOT High-school graduates Julio and Tenoch are left to their own devices when their girlfriends go travelling for the summer; at a wedding they meet Luisa, the Spanish wife of one of Tenoch's relatives, Jano. For a lark they suggest a trip to a fictional beach, 'Heaven's Mouth'; at first Luisa declines, but after a visit to her doctor and a drunken phonecall from her husband, who admits to an affair, she agrees to join the boys. The journey reveals plenty of home truths among the trio, culminating in sex between all three. The boys return to the city without Luisa.

THE FILM Despite its reputation as a beautiful, sexy, art-house film, Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también has a social conscience. Nor is death ever very far away, for that matter. A soundtrack featuring the likes of Señor Coconut and Brian Eno is brutally interrupted by a narrator who, when he is not filling in details of the central characters' backgrounds, recounts the lives of figures the trio meet on their journey: the migrant bricklayer who is killed on a motorway taking a shortcut that saves him a two-mile walk every day; the fate of the fisherman they befriend late on, whose livelihood is taken away from him by coastal hotel developments until he is reduced to working as a janitor to support his family; or the 23 pigs who escape from a ranch, 14 of whom are slaughtered within two months.

Even Emmanuel Lubezki's camera is distracted, wandering into the kitchen at a café where the characters have stopped; an elderly woman begins a jerking, shrugging dance as if she's in a David Lynch movie. It is reminiscent of Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), another feature film with Gael García Bernal and a documentary feel, though Y tu mamá is a good deal less heavyhanded, therefore way more successful.

Julio and Tenoch face a summer of smoking dope and wanking at the swimming pool. It's the sort of season where they miss their chance of participating in an orgy - a friend scores his first experience of group sex at a party - but they've gone home early. So when sensual married Spaniard Luisa takes them up on an invite to a fictitious beach, they hustle to make it happen.

While the ostensible reason for Luisa agreeing to join these boys 10 years her junior is her husband's admission that he has slept with someone else, it turns out that he is a serial adulterer and she has long tolerated his affairs in the hope he will change. Luisa has been diagnosed with terminal cancer; she decides to stay with the fisherman's family they befriend at the end of the film and dies one month later.

You might question whether writers Alfonso and Carlos Cuarón had to put a death sentence on their heroine for her to be allowed to cut loose but its revelation is truly poignant. After all, why else would she want to hang out with two boys of whom she says: 'You play with babies you end up washing diapers.'

Sharing dope initially opens up the trio's sexual histories, and it turns out they're as inexperienced as each other, including Luisa. The love of her life was killed in a motorcycle accident at the same age the boys are now; she fell for Jano, who enriches her sexual experience with tips brought back from his conquests. 'You ever wiggle your finger up the ass?' she asks, in a very different take on that refrain familiar from Jonathan Glazer's terrifying gangster flick Sexy Beast (2000). (Splitting up with Jano, Luisa leaves various advice on their formerly shared answering machine, including this priceless tip on his dry cleaner: 'Don't go there any more, they ruin your clothes.')

Nor is her role to widen the boys' experience: masters of the swift fuck, the sex she has with each of them is no better, however much she may pity their luckless girlfriends. After fucking Tenoch she feels she has upset the balance in the 'inseparable entity' that is the boys' relationship and decides it's up to her to set things right by having sex with Julio. She has misread her place in their ménage à trois: the boys have discovered that they have slept with each other's girlfriends.

In the fury that follows, the social differences between Julio and Tenoch are accentuated: Tenoch the son of a government minister, given his Aztec-inspired name to curry electoral favour; Julio labelled a social climber who, it turns out, has never got over seeing his mother in the arms of his godfather.

Once such truths have been spoken, and the boys kiss in the heady climactic scene, things cannot return to how they were: Julio and Tenoch are no longer in touch. Their girlfriends come back from Europe and dump them; the pair prepare for university. One day they bump into each other, with Julio tellingly dressed like a preppy, and agree to go for a coffee because it's easier than making an excuse not to; it is here Tenoch tells Julio that Luisa is dead. The best friends never see each other again.

KEY SCENES Chapter 1, 0:22 The film sets out its stall immediately: Tenoch and his grifriend Ana are having frenzied sex in her bedroom, beneath a giant poster for Harold and Maude; Julio isn't so welcome in girlfriend Cecilia's home, but when he's called to help her look for her passport, she frantically tugs down her tracksuit bottoms and again sex is very quick.

Chapter 11, 50:39 Tenoch goes to Luisa's bedroom to borrow shampoo. She asks him to take off the towel he's wearing and to go down on her; sex is very quick.

Chapter 12 1:01:50 Luisa joins Julio in the back of the car and they start to have sex; Tenoch pulls over but tries to watch. Sex is very quick.

Chapter 17, 1:28:07 After a drunken evening at an outdoor bar, the three go back to their hut together: Luisa strips and fellates Julio and Tenoch; the boys kiss. I've often wondered if the crucial moment in this scene, when she goes down on them, is panned and scanned as the shot doesn't seem as balanced as the rest of the film.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT To the surprise of many, Alfonso Cuarón was chosen to direct the third instalment in the hugely popular boy-wizard franchise - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) - and a great success the decision proved. Notably, he created an unnerving atmosphere, which helped pushed the series in a more adult direction. Alfonso also executive produced his son Jonás Cuarón's directorial debut, Año Uña (2007).

Año Uña is remarkable in that it's told in still photographs; very loosely it shares themes of a (slightly) older woman attracted to a younger boy, and vice versa, and also social reflections of the relationship, here between the United States and Mexico. A young American girl, Molly (Eireann Harper), flirts with the even younger Diego while on holiday in Mexico; he takes her up on an only half-intended invitation to visit her in New York.

KEY QUOTE 'What you really want is to fuck each other' - Luisa