A while back, Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door linked to an essay on Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now by Sheila O’Malley, in which she said the following:

So when that sex scene comes … it’s not like a gymnastics soft-lit scene , the way you so often see in Hollywood movies. Where when people take off their clothes, they cease being human beings – or characters – and just become People Having Sex. As though everyone has sex the same way – married couples, one-night stands, whatever, and everyone is good and graceful at it, and nobody has body issues, and there’s always a soundtrack … We all know scenes like that. This scene, which comes in the first half of the movie – is, indeed, striking – and there’s a reason why it is referred to all the time. They’re both buck naked – the scene goes on forever – but watching it, I felt … Let’s see. First of all – as the scene goes on and on, there are intercut scenes, glimpses of them getting dressed afterwards because they’re going out to dinner. So we get a close-up of her buttoning her blouse, him zipping his trousers … interspersed with the love-making. Fascinating. This is a real relationship. Couples behave this way all the time. You are naked, then an hour later you’re clothed and you’re at a dinner party. The world doesn’t STOP for sex. Sex is just ONE part of a relationship, and the way the scene was edited really hit that home. I thought it was a great choice.

“The world doesn’t STOP for sex”? To paraphrase the Woodman, it does if you’re doing it right!

The praise heaped on this scene has baffled me ever since I first saw the film years ago. Simply put, this really isn’t how sex works. (In my experience, of course. Not to put too fine a point on it or anything–it’s just, who else’s experience would I be basing this on?) From your diminished pain response on down, sex is an immediate, all-consuming enterprise. Roeg’s cross-cutting to Julie Christine and Donald Sutherland getting dressed afterwards appears sexy because of the way it acknowledges the everyday intimacy of a married couple, but it’s actually emotionally, and more importantly erotically, false. It would work if we were to interpret the getting-dressed as “right now” and the sex as a flashback, but if I recall correctly the scene is framed so that the getting-dressed is a flash-forward from the in-the-now sex. There have been a lot of times where I’ve fondly recalled sex after the fact, but literally never have I drifted away during the act to ruminate about putting my pants back on.

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