December 1st, 2006
Don’t Look Now and good & bad sex
What a coincidence that in the week I spotted Copernicus post about Don’t Look Now and James Bond, a Special Edition DVD of the 1973 Nicolas Roeg classic has just been released.
The film - about a couple on holiday in Venice after the death of their child - is a masterpiece of cinema, often subsumed (by virtue of checking all the right boxes of psychological thriller) into the horror genre. Apart from the fact that it’s a tragedy brimming with pathos, is based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier (author of an all-time favourite book of mine, Rebecca), it’s also one of the bloody scariest films you’ll ever see. It also has another interesting angle and oft-quoted piece of film trivia; that the sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie was actually real.
Today’s UK Indo has an article about this famous scene, claiming that is was far from off-the-cuff - but it also reveals something that convinces me that Christie and Sutherland are even better actors than I thought. Not only is the scene erotic and tasteful, it’s full of unspoken emotion, intercut with shots of the couple getting ready to go out. Apparently it was shot early on in the film. To be precise, it was shot on the first day that the two actors met for the first time. It’s an utterly convincing and practically flawless depiction of sex, which is a total contradiction to the ‘Bad Sex Awards’ which were handed out in the literary world this week. Winner Iain Hollingshead beat off stiff (oo-er) competition from Will Self and David Mitchell with the likes of this paragraph: “she was moaning now, her curves pushed up against me, her crotch taut against my bulging trousers, her hands gripping fistfuls of my hair. She reaches for my belt. I groan too, in expectation. And then I’m inside her, and everything is pure white as we’re lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles”.
The new Special Edition DVD of Don’t Look Now contains commentary by director Nicolas Roeg, and we can only assume that Donald Sutherland was pretty happy with the film - he gave one of his sons the director’s surname for a first name.
December 1st, 2006 at 7:42 pm
Ah the bad sex awards. Was a good thread on Fustar about them last year. I suppose it’s a good thing modern teens don’t get their knowledge of sex from the “dirty” bits of contemporary fiction, or they’d be pretty seriously misled.
I don’t I’d be pretty trepidatious if I thought my first ride was going to pitch me unceremoniously into a commotion of trippy explosions and parpy squeaks.
In other news, will certainly be getting my grubby mitts on the special edition of Don’t Look Now.
December 3rd, 2006 at 7:23 pm
Sutherland said in The Guardian magazine earlier this year that the rumour about the ‘real’ sex scene was rubbish. Just bloody good acting he reckons…
December 5th, 2006 at 9:53 am
And then I’m inside her, and everything is pure white as we’re lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles�.
Awesome. It’s not often you read a sex scene and imagine tiny little pigs fucking while they zoom around some inverted space.