In our new weekly series Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sex scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy. For our inaugural edition, I figured we could look at one of the most talked about, revered, and controversial sex scenes in cinema history from Nicolas Roeg's 1973 thriller Don't Look Now.
As a quick refresher, the film concerns married couple Laura (Julie Christie) and John (Donald Sutherland) who move to Venice from England after the drowning death of their pre-teen daughter. The two attempt to put their lives back together following this tragedy, and thirty minutes in, they share a tender four minute love scene complete with cunnilingus, something rarely if ever shown in a mainstream film at the time...
Looking at the scene some forty six years after it was filmed, it doesn't seemto live up to its reputation asa lightning rod for controversy, thanks in no small part to the scene's editing which artfully dodges anything overtly explicit. Due to the almost aching intimacy on display in the scene, it was dogged with rumors of being the real deal, an unsimulated sex act preserved on film despite the many hurdles any production would have to clear in order for this to be accurate.
These rumorshave persisted over the years despite fervent denials from both stars and the director. One man who really fanned the flames of this particularversion of events is writer Peter Bart, who claims in his 2011 book "Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob, (and Sex)" to have been on set during the filming of the scene...
My gaze shifted to the actors, and I was riveted. By their shifting positions, it was clear to me they were no longer simply acting: they were fucking on camera.
"Nic," I whispered to the director. "Don't they expect you to say 'cut'?"
"I just want to be sure I have the coverage," he mumbled.
"His dick is moving in and out of her," I whispered back. "That's beyond coverage."
"Cut," said Roeg. The actors did not seem to hear him, or simply didn't care. I decided to make a run for my plane.
Everyone that was on set during the filming of this scene has refuted Bart's claims that he was there, but Christie's lover at the time Warren Beatty has backed Bart's version of events. The two have even claimed to have cut the scene themselves, which seems like a bridge too far toward credibility.
For his part, Sutherland attempted to set the record straight in a 2018 interview with Vultureinsisting that the scene itself was shot in a boner-killing environment...
But it’s not a sex scene … You know something, you know how that was shot? It was shot with unblimped Arriflex cameras. We were in a room by ourselves. I don’t know about Julie, but I’m never naked in front of somebody! I’m not even naked in front of my children. I’m naked in front of my wife — that’s it. I was shy. For a couple of very specific reasons, she was physically shy. But we got over our shyness, went into the room, and were standing like Adam and Eve waiting for somebody to give us an apple. And in one corner was Nic Roeg, and right beside him was [cinematographer] Tony Richmond. They had two unblimped Arriflexes. An unblimped Arriflex sounds like a Singer sewing machine on methamphetamines.
Really?
Oh yeah. [Makes loud AAAAAAGHHHHHH noise.] It’s like that! You can’t do sound with it. So there was no sound. They were very short, 15- to 20-second takes. It was literally like, “Julie, tilt your back. Donald, put your head towards her.” AAAAAAGHHHHHH. “Now Julie, move your head to the side.” AAAAAAGHHHHHH. It was like that! The whole thing. It took your gut away from you. But then, what [Roeg] did, was he cut it together with getting dressed. It was perfect. No sound, just music. I’m very proud of that.Intercutting the moments of intimacy with the rather mundane act of the couple dressing and preparing to leavefor dinnerseems like a stroke of genius in retrospect, but was actually Roeg's way of avoiding further censorship from the BBFC and the MPAA...
"They scrutinized it and found absolutely nothing they could object to. If someone goes up, you cut and the next time you see them they're in a different position, you obviously fill in the gaps for yourself. But, technically speaking, there was no 'humping' in that scene."
In the end, he only removed nine frames from the scene—roughly one third of a second of footage—in order to avoid a more restrictive rating.As you can see from the still below, though, even if there wasn't any real, penetrative sex happening, Sutherland's mouth is clearly on Christie's bush. Yes, his mouth may be closed and she may have some sort of privacy patch on, but he's definitely giving her a whisker tickle with his mustache.
As to the scoring of the scene, composer Pino Donaggio had initially favored a traditional grand orchestral piece, but eventually conceded to Roeg's demands thatit was overwhelming the scene. Donaggio instead used only four instruments for this particular scene—piano, flute, acoustic guitar, and acoustic bass—and Roeg then reused the same piece of music for the film's final scene. In his essay "Seeing Red" which accompanied the film's release by The Criterion Collection in 2015,film writer David Thompson suggests that this serves a symbolic purpose as well...
The presence of Donaggio’s gentle theme hints that this is a gesture by them toward conceiving another child. Roeg has even encouraged the interpretation that, when Laura smiles proudly in the final images of the funeral in Venice, it is not just because she feels that Christine and John are united in another world but also because she knows she is pregnant.
Don't Look Now's legacy can be felt in many otherfilms from Lars von Trier's Antichrist to Lynne Ramsey's We Need to Talk About Kevin, but on an even more micro-level, the sex scene itself has been an influence on many other sex scenes, the most prominent and obvious of them being Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight.Soderbergh smartly mimics Roeg's intercutting of sex with dialogue and footage from George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez's date earlier in the evening to create one of the sexiest non-nude sex scenes in cinema history...
