Two visionary directors struggle with difficult subjects, a provocateur's most accessible film, a blockbuster gothic horror movie, and the final film of a legend all await you on November 11 in Movie Nudity History!
2016: Elle
On this day four years ago, Paul Verhoeven released only his second feature film since releasing Hollow Man in the year 2000, this provocative film about sexual assault. Made in France starring legendary French actress Isabelle Huppert in thelead role as a powerful woman in charge of a successful video game company. One night, she is assaulted in her home by a masked man, but doesn't report it to the police, leading her to grow suspicious of every man in her life. Her relationship with her adult son Vincent is strained, she's currently having an affair with her best friend's husband, and seemingly every man that works for her at the company hates her enough to have been the assailant.
The entire film hinges on, not so much a twist as an unexpected subversion of your typical film dealing with the aftermath of a sexual assault. It's not worth spoiling if you haven't seen it, but allow me to say that as uncomfortable as it is sure to make you, that is entirely the point Verhoeven is making. Huppert is topless several times in the film, including during the assault at the very beginning...
We also get some bonus frontal from the gorgeous Caroline Breton, who bares her rack and rug while chatting with a clothed Huppert and her shirtless son...
Huppert is revelatory in the film, earning a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her workin what is easily one of Verhoeven's best. The film pushes boundaries in a way only Verhoeven and Huppert's work can and it raises some prickly questions with answers that are sure to upset many audience members. If you haven't seen this flick, seek it out, it's truly one of a kind, particularly in our world of numbing sameness.
2016: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
In 2012, director Peter Jackson attempted to change the 3D game with the introduction of "High Frame Rate" projection. Audiences more or less roundly rejected this new 48 frames per second way of watching movies, but it didn't stop other filmmakers like Ang Lee from seeing the potential in a higher frame rate. For his follow-up to his Oscar-winning smash Life of Pi, Lee chose to adapt another novel, this one dealing with the PTSD suffered by a soldier who is being honored during the halftime ceremony of the Dallas Cowboys' Thanksgiving Day game.
Lee shot the film in a staggering 120 frames per second, bringing an image clarity that helped to disorient the audience in the same way the film's main character is disoriented by life. Thanks to the fact that only a handful of cinemas in the entire world could actually project the film the way Lee intended, the film couldn't make much of an impact and audiences seemed indifferent to this style of cinema. The film isn't wholly successful on its own merits, so it's interesting to think about what the experience might have been like were more people able to see it the way Lee wanted.
The film's not a total wash, however, as it does have a nude scene from the gorgeous Makenzie Leigh, playing one of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders who pays a visit to Billy's hotel room at the 52 minute mark for sex with the title character...
2011: Melancholia
Danish bad boy director Lars von Trier caused quite a stir with comments he made at the Cannes premiere of this, his unlucky 13th feature film. Melancholia might actually be the provocateur's most accessible film, which is interesting because it's about as nutty as everything else he's done. Kirsten Dunst stars as Justine, a woman who should be experiencing the happiest day of her life—her marriage to Alexander Skarsgard—but instead is slowly unraveling in a fog of depression.
To make matters worse, scientists have just discovered a rogue planet called Melancholia that was hiding behind our sun and is set to fly by the earth. However, Justine's sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is being racked with visions of the planet's destruction thanks to a collision with this new planet. For the first time in quite a while, it seems, von Trier was on to something profound, the notion of how insignificant our own human problems are compared with the impending doom of our planet. This is why it's seemingly his most accessible film and a good starting place for anyone interested in the director's work.
17 years to the day after making her screen debut in Interview with the Vampire, Kirsten Dunst makes her full-on official nude debut in this flick. She'd gone nude before but the scenes were either cut (All Good Things) or not very good (Marie Antoinette). There was no denying that she was nude and showing us everything in this flick, though, as she lays nude in the grass under the moonlight an hour and twenty-six minutes in...
1994: Interview with the Vampire
Fresh off his breakout Oscar-winning success with The Crying Game, Irish director Neil Jordan jumped whole hog into Hollywood excess with this lavish adaptation of Anne Rice's novel of the same name. The film was mired in controversy from minute one, namely that Rice was exceptionally displeased with the casting of Tom Cruise as her iconic creation Lestat. However, general audiences didn't seem to mind as the film made over $200 million worldwide on a $60 million budget.
The homoerotic subtext between Cruise and Brad Pitt is off the charts throughout the film, meaning that there's kind of a dearth of female nudity outside of two scenes. The first finds child vampire Kirsten Dunst—making her screen debut—admiring a naked woman (Nicole DuBois) and also realizing that she'll never be able to grow up and have a body like this woman. Poignant and sexy, all at the same time...
The other nude scene is much better known and certainly the more skinsational of the two! Antonio Banderas' Armand plays a seductive vampire living in Paris, who invites Pitt and Dunst to one of his theatrical performances. It turns out, it's basically just a bunch of vampires feeding on poor defenseless Laure Marsac, who is stripped nude and devoured by the vamps...
1983: Star 80
**Portions of the following text are excerpted from our SKIN-depth Look at Bob Fosse's Films...
The phrase "the bloom was off the rose" applies to director Bob Fosse's view of the way men use sex for power in this tragic true story of Playboy Playmate of the Year for 1980,Dorothy Stratten. Played here byMariel Hemingway—in what should have been a star-making turn—Fosse weaves a tale of a woman manipulated by many different, powerful men, all of whom fail to protect her from the real danger, her psychopathic ex-husband Paul Snider, played by Eric Roberts in what is arguably his finest performance.
The film is a condemnation of the people in Dorothy's life that failed to protect her from Paul's evil grasp, making her shocking death all the more unsettling. It's no wonder everyone close to the deceased Playmate disavowed the film. The whole thing had only happened two years prior to Fosse releasing the film in 1983, turning the dark film into a hot potato no one wanted to get caught holding.
Fosse casts his gaze on the three powerful men in Stratten's life: Snider, Hugh Hefner (Cliff Robertson), and Aram Nicholas (Roger Rees)—a surrogate for real-life director Peter Bogdanovich, who was in a relationship with Stratten at the time of her murder. While Fosse obviously saves his deepest loathing for Snider, his opinion of the other two isn't much higher. They are shown as manipulative, controlling, and ultimately apathetic to the real danger in which she found herself.
Fosse takes no pleasure in relating to Snider, which is likely why he loathes the character so much.Eric Robertsadmitted in interviews that Fosse encouraged him toplay Snider as Fosse had he not achieved success. Fosse admitted readily that he could have very easily become bitter and angry like Snider, thus making him an uncomfortably relatable character. Fosse exposes the misogynistic rage Snider carries around as hollow and Roberts plays it as an indictment of his own insecurities.
As for the sex and nudity in the film, it's almost all presented with a smearing of vaseline on Fosse's lens, softened to the point where they look like a Playboy pictorial from the era. There's plenty of Fosse's precise cutting to be found here, with the frame freezing as the sound of a camera shutter hits on the soundtrack...
Fosse uses the sex and nudity to lure you into a false sense of eroticism, despite the framing device that informs you of Stratten's murder before the film proper even starts. It's a savvy move on Fosse's part to make the nudity sexy, as if that was the justification used by Snider, Hefner, and Bogdanovich: She gets a lot of guys off, who cares about the one or two that may take things too far?
It's a scathing condemnation of the entertainment industry in general, and that it's Fosse's final film makes it something of a thesis statement on his view of the industry he was a part of from the age of 13. It's no mistake that this was the last message he sent before his untimely death in 1987 at the age of 59. Men sure do love beautiful women, but they use those women to their own ends with little consideration of what will happen to them afterwards. It's bone chilling, eerily prescient, and socially progressive for a film made nearly four decades ago.
