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.
I saw Don’t Look Now for the first time last night, Sean, and I flashed back to this post o’ yours when the sex-scene happened (… or your post really the present, and my watching the movie the flash-forward? I just blew my mind!). Anyway, the way I took the scene wasn’t, as Keith argued, as this deep affirmation of the intimacy of their relationship – actually just the contrary. They’d already lost their daughter at this point and both seem to be in complete denial about how fucked up they are over it. Watching the movie last night I just kept thinking what a couple of assholes they were – as one example, their son, who witnessed his sister’s drowning, is shipped right back to boarding school with nary a thought. The first time we see them post-death it’s as if nothing has happened – they’re cheerily chatting over lunch. They never seem to discuss their problems, and their lives implode because of a total lack of communication with each other. The flash-forwarding within the sex scene only underlined this, well, coldness, from my point of view; the act was over before it had even begun, and meant nothing; they’d expressed nothing to each other. Their sex was as mind-blowing as zipping up one’s pants.
That’s a vastly more convincing take on the scene than anything arguing for its hotness or realness!