In our weekly seriesAnatomy of a Nude Scene, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy. This week, Eva Green explodes on the scene with her sexually adventurous role in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers.
It seems almost impossible to think about now, but there was once a time when we had no clue who Eva Green was, let alone having her invade our fantasies on the regular. Born two minutes before her fraternal twin sister Joy on July 6, 1980, Eva first became enamored with acting after seeing Isabelle AdjaniinThe Story of Adele H.when she was fourteen. This caused some consternation from her mother, French New Wave legendMarlène Jobert, who knew the industry's penchant for chewing actresses up and spitting them out again and again.
Eva eventually set her sights on theatre over film, but this tug-of-war between mother and daughter came to a head when Eva was offered the leading female role in Bernardo Betolucci's 2003 film The Dreamersas her film debut. Her mother and her agent both dissuaded Eva from taking the role due to the amount of sexual content in the script, obviously both of them seeing the parallels between Eva and Last Tango in Paris star Maria Schneider. Schneider's experience making the film was notoriously terrible—you can read more about it in our SKIN-depth Look at Bertolucci's films—and they didn't want to see her end up in the same place.
Eva had a few advantages over Schneider, namely that she was three years older than Schneider was at the time cameras were set to roll, which may not seem like a huge difference. 19-year old Schneider was thrown into a situation where she was acting almost exclusively opposite Marlon Brando, one of the most notoriously cagey actors in Hollywood history, where the 22-year old Green would making a film mostly with her contemporaries, not to mention having a substantially older and wiser Bertolucci at the helm.
Against their wishes, Eva took the role and threw herself into it completely. She plays Isabelle, twin sister of Théo (Louis Garrel), two bohemians living in Paris just prior to the 1968 Paris student riots which brought the bohemian way of life to an abrupt end. The twins meet an American teen named Matthew (Michael Pitt), who has come to Paris to study film, and the three bond over their shared love of cinema. They end up bonding over a lot more than that, however, as the sexually repressed American soon gets turned on to the free-love scene the twins have been drenched in their entire lives.
Green spends a substantial amount of screen time in various states of undress, with no moment endearingherto audiences faster than her amazing recreation ofAlexandros of Antioch's famous Venus De Milo sculpture, sporting long black gloves that make her arms disappear into the black background...
She arguably has much better and more explicit nude scenes in the film, but there was something instantly iconic about this scene in particular. It is obviously designed in such a way that it couldn't help but immediately burn itself into audience's brains, but the combination of Green's perfection contrasted with that of one of the world's most famous sculpture created the perfect storm in which to create a new star.It certainly helps thathere's substantially less disparity in nudity herewhen compared withLast Tango. Brando's only nude scene in that film comes when he moons some judges at a dance competition, whereas both Pitt and Garrel have multiple full frontal scenes.
This didn't help to soften the blow of Green's first viewing of the film, however, as shecowered at the sight of her many nude scenes. In a profile of the film, its director, and stars in The Guardianin early 2004, Green stated that she was startled by the collision of her memories of shooting the film and what ended up in the finished product...
"I saw the film in rough cut, and I was quite shocked," she says. "I looked down when I saw my body and saw the sex scenes. For me it was as though I was wearing a costume while we were making the film. It was as if I had another story in my mind. So I was left speechless."
When asked by interviewer Xan Brooks about working with Bertolucci and how that measured up with the image of him concocted by her parents and her agent, she came to his defense...
"Bernardo can be manipulative, but at the same time he makes you feel very free. It was a real exchange of ideas. And maybe he is different from how he was in the past. He is sixtysomething, not thirtysomething. Perhaps he is wiser and kinder now." She pauses to consider this. "It's not like he's a pervert," she says. "He is like my dad."
In fairness, she can't possibly speak to an experience that another actress had with the same director thirty years prior, she can rely only on her own experiences, which were clearly nowhere as traumatic as those had by Schneider. Thankfully the entire endeavor didn't turn Green off from acting or nudity as she has done plenty of both in the ensuing years. Nude debuts are not a one-size-fits-all proposition and it's comforting to know that Eva Greencame out the other side of hers with a desire to do more. We live in dark enough times as is, it would be a shame to not have the Eva Green we all know and love as a part of it.
Catch Up With Our Other "Nude Debut" Editions of Anatomy of a Nude Scene
—Scarlett Johansson's Nude Debut in Under the Skin
—How Halle Berry's Nude Debut Led Her to Monster's Ball
—Showgirls and the Dangers of High Camp
—Katie Holmes Makes The Gift Worth Remembering
—Wild Things Presents Every Man with His Dream Threesome Scenario
—Anne Hathaway Wreaks Havoc on Her Disney Image
—Margot Robbie Makes The Wolf of Wall Street a Skinstant Classic
—Lindsay Lohan Finally Goes Topless in The Canyons
—Jennifer Connelly Comes Of Age in The Hot Spot
—Shannon Elizabeth Serves Up a Slice of American Pie
—Isabella Rossellini's Intentionally Unsexy Nude Debut inBlue Velvet
—In a Wild MomentGets Lost in Translation asBlame it on Rio
—Lisa Bonet's Bloody Nude Debut inAngel Heart
—Molly Ringwald Does Her Only Topless Scene in Malicious
**Click Here to Read All Past Editions of Anatomy of a Nude Scene/Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy**
