A genre chameleon if ever there was one, Steven Soderbergh has built his entire career around not wanting to be pinned down or pigeonholed in any way. His debut feature, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, is considered one of the pioneering films of the indie film renaissance that began in the late 80s and exploded in the mid-90s. Soderbergh spent the 90s experimenting with form, making some truly bizarre films like Schizopolis and Kafka, while alsoachieving period authenticity with King of the Hill, and bringing the monologue film back into vogue with Gray's Anatomystarring the late Spalding Gray.
The late 90s finally saw Soderbergh gain critical and commercial success—though not in equal measure—with films like Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the Ocean's trilogy. Brockovich and Traffic both earned Best Picture and dual Best Director noms for Soderbergh, making him the first director to achieve that feat since Michael Curtiz 61 years earlier, with Soderbergh taking home the award for the latter.
Like many other filmmakers, success pushed Soderbergh into the realm of self-sabotage. Ocean's Eleven was a hit, let's make an even more inaccessible remake of a Russian science fiction film with the same star. He also announced his retirement in 2013, only to later dubit a "sabbatical," as he returned to work on Cinemax's The Knick in under a year. In recent years he has gained notoriety for editing other filmmaker's movies, releasing a 108 minute version of Michael Cimino's twice as long Heaven's Gate, trimming 2001: A Space Odyssey down to 110 minutes, and recutting Raiders of the Lost Ark as a black and white silent film with the score from The Social Network.
For a guy whose first film had the word "Sex" right there in the title, his work is notoriously light on the stuff. For a guy with nearly three dozen feature film directorial credits to his name, only nine of his films have notable sexual content and only seven of those actually have nudity. Some of this content is pretty interesting, though, so let's dive right in...
The Underneath (1995)
During Soderbergh's quest to be as chameleonic as possible in the early 90s, heembarked on his first remake of sorts.Based on the same novel that inspiredthe1949 film noir classicCriss Cross, The Underneath was Soderbergh attemptingto prove that form can follow content, while still remaining stylish and fresh. Though it plays as quite dated now—particularly compared with other similar noirish films of the time like Bound—there is an undeniable feeling that you're watching a filmmaker fall in love with some rather pulpy material.
The film stars Peter Gallagher as a guy returning to town after a gambling debt drove him away. Heattempts to get back in the good graces of the wife he abandoned, played by Alison Elliott, taking a job as an armored car driver. He soon concocts a boneheaded scheme to steal from his employer and things quickly go from bad to worse.
In addition to experimenting for the first time with camera filters—many scenes are bathed in blue light—the film also features some nice transitional edits, like the film's only nude scene. Alison Elliott is lying in bed with Gallagher, the room bathed in warm amber light from the fireplace, and as he begins to roll over her, we get a nice look at her ass. However, as he finishes the roll, she turns into Elisabeth Shue, in another room, this time bathed in blue—who sadly doesn't show any skin...
Out of Sight (1998)
Soderberghcontinued adapting books with his 1998 take on Elmore Leonard's novel of the same name.Style and substance collide in this flick which was very well received by critics—earning two Oscar nominations—but turned out to be a box office disappointment. The set-up, like all Elmore Leonard stories, is relatively simple: A bank robber (George Clooney) busts out of prison, taking a U.S. Marshal (Jennifer Lopez) hostage in the process. Also like all of Leonard's stories, the devil's in the details as we're introduced to a sparkling array of colorful supporting characters and complications to the main plot.
There's no nudity in this flick and the only sex scene is shot mostly in close-up. The scene itself is a riff on Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, mixing shots of intimacy with a mundane conversation. Jennifer Lopez disrobing in front of George Clooney may not be a nude scene, but I'd wager to say it's one of the sexiest shots in any Soderbergh flick...
Erin Brockovich (2000)
Soderbergh finally attained that elusive mix of critical favorite and box office success with his first film of the new century, Erin Brockovich. The film earned Julia Roberts an Oscar for playing her most overtly sexual character since she earned her first Best Actress Oscar nomination ten years earlier for Pretty Woman. Roberts spends most of the movie in well supported bras that consistently push her cleavage up over the neckline of her shirts.
Roberts has more or less always kept the goods on lockdown, so it's no major surprise that she doesn't go nude in this flick. It is nice spending time in the company of her cleavage however, probably the only reason to revisit the film at all...
Solaris (2002)
Following his Best Director win for Traffic and the massive, runaway success of Ocean's Eleven, Soderbergh went boldly back to his indie roots in 2002 with two wildly different films. Full Frontal was a stripped down, loosely improvisational riff on fame and the industry which was shot early in the digital revolution—meaning it looks like garbage now.
For his other film that year, he re-teamed with his Out of Sight and Ocean's lead George Clooney for a loose remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1971 sci-fi masterpiece Solaris. Running 70 minutes shorter than its predecessor,Solaristries desperately to recapture the original film's sparseness in both its plot, dialogue, and characterizations, but it falls short of its forebear in nearly every way. Soderbergh claimed he was being more faithful to authorStanisław Lem's novel, but it is undeniably inferior to Tarkovsky's more successfully enigmatic take on the material.
One notable thing about Solaris is that it's one of the few PG-13 films of the new millennium to contain nudity, both male and female. When Clooney's grieving astronaut is reunited with his long dead wife (Natascha McElhone), we see their buns and McElhone's left breast as they canoodle naked on the spaceship...
Eros (2004) Segment: "Equilibrium"
In 2004, Soderbergh teamed up with filmmaking legends Wong Kar-wai and Michelangelo Antonioni for this anthology film comprised of three short films, each in the filmmaker's native language—English, Mandarin, and Italian, respectively. Soderbergh's segment stars a fresh-out-of-rehab Robert Downey, Jr. as an advertising exec discussing with his therapist (Alan Arkin) hiserotic dreamsabout a woman in his building (Ele Keats).
To mimic the dream-like state of the fantasies, Soderbergh chose to shoot Keats' nude scene in a shaky, handheld manner that barely allows you to enjoy the fact that she's fully nude. For a project called Eros, his is unfortunately the least sexy segment...
The Good German (2006)
When word came down that Soderbergh was putting together a black and white World War II film starring Cate Blanchett and longtime collaborator George Clooney, most people thought it would be a surefire awards contender come Oscar season. The Good German turned out to be the latest in a string of mid-aughts disappointments from Soderbergh like the two sequels to Ocean's Eleven and his 2005 digital day-and-date experiment Bubble.
The film's highlight comes when Deadwood's Robin Weigert,playing a burlesque dancer named Hannelore, does the infamous giant fan dance. Soderbergh treats us to the upstage view of the routine, opposite what the audience sees, giving us a chance to ogle her breasts as she prepares to go into a full split...
The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
In case you've gotten this far into the article and still don't think that Soderbergh loves taking risks, he cast adult performer Sasha Grey in this, her first mainstream film. Grey plays Chelsea, a high-priced escort living in Manhattan who, for a price, will give men "the girlfriend experience," meaning she'llhang out and pretend to be their girlfriend without challenging them or talking back like a real autonomous woman might.
The film is not as skin-filled asthe spin-off series that bears its name, nor even as much as one might expect considering it stars an adult performer. Again, Soderbergh is far from the most risk averse guy around, but it's pretty ballsy to have a movie like this, starring a porn star, and only have two nude scenes total. Five minutes in, we get a nice full frontal shot of Sasha getting out of bed, though I had to brighten this GIF considerably so you could see anything at all...
Later in the film, we get another nice look at Sasha's breasts as she bathes one of her clients as he bitches about his job...
And that's it. Thankfully the television series of the same name, also produced by Soderbergh, has more than made up for the lack of nudity in the film.
Magic Mike (2012)
While technically not ironic, per se, it's interesting that the film on Soderbergh's cv with the most female nudity is the one about male strippers. 2012's Magic Mike, based on star Channing Tatum's own experiences working as a male stripper, opens with Olivia Munn topless on film for the very first time, getting dressed after a threesome with Tatum and a woman passed out on the bed...
Later in the film as we get to know the various strippers, we meet Mircea Monroe, playing the wife of Matt Bomer's Ken. She's just doing what any good wife of a male stripper would be doing, hanging out topless in a bedroom at someone else's house...
There's also a brief scene where Tatum and co-star Cody Horn have an altercation while Riley Keough—who would go on to star in the first season of The Girlfriend Experience—is passed out topless on the bed behind them...
Seriously, the next time someone tells you they don't want to watch a movie about male strippers, let them know it's got Olivia Munn, Mircea Monroe, and Elvis' granddaughter nude in it.
Side Effects (2013)
2013's Side Effects was, at the time of its release, going to be Soderbergh's final theatrically released feature. A nasty little thriller about a woman (Rooney Mara) who murders her husband (Channing Tatum) and successfully gets a jury to acquit her due to negligence by the pharmaceutical company that created the drug she was taking which made her murder in the first place. Of course, this all happens in the film's first act, meaning that there's much more to the mystery... and it's up to Jude Law to solve it.
Early in the film we're treated to a steamy sex scene where Mara bares her breasts while riding Tatum...
Later in the film, Mara is revealed to be having an affair with her doctor, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, and the two lock lips for a steamy sapphic smooch...
Other than that, this is a mostly forgettable effort from Soderbergh. It's fun while you're watching it, but it fails to linger, which may be the price of his prolificness. Because he makes so many movies, it's hard for any of them to really stand out, besides the obviously great ones like Out of Sightand Traffic. I doubt there's anything that will make Soderbergh slow his roll, as he appears to just have a constant need to work. On the positive side, though, this means that his next nudity filled movie might be right around the corner.
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
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Non-nude images viaIMDb
