The new film that I’ve directed, True Bromance, is about a man seeking romantic advice from his friends and family about how to win the heart of a woman he’s never met. The hero’s best buddy, the author Jim Norton, counsels him on what to do when he first meets her: “Take what you want. Lick her mouth – that’s how I met my girlfriend. Right in the hallway, I licked her mouth. Women like that. It’s kind of bossy. It’s kind of sassy.”
Such forwardness, both from a man to a woman, and from a woman to a man — and for that matter from a man to a man, and a woman to a woman — is hardly fashionable in films today. In the hit movie and novel One Day, it takes the lovers 20 years to get round to letting their passions loose — and we never even see a first kiss.
Love’s thunderbolt is one our deepest fantasies. Audiences everywhere want the electricity of first desire coursing through our veins. But puritan broadcasting standards, combined with the bad name that porn has given to sexual gratification, have left a gaping hole on our screens where star-crossed ids should be colliding.
Certainly, there is a place for unrealized sexual tension, built carefully over a period of time. Mad Men and The Hour have both been good at that, as was the miniseries Mildred Pearce. But sometimes, Eros works more immediately — and we want to see those moments. Oscar Wilde was right when he remarked that “only shallow people don’t go on first impressions.” It’s the demand for on-the-spot ravishing that underpins the success of the recent wave of vampire movies and shows. Because the vampire is dead, and inhabits a different moral universe to humans, we can enjoy all their un-repressed assaults without any sense of guilt.
But even in the state-of-the-art fanger show, True Blood, it takes the sexiest vampire Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgård) more than three whole seasons to really sink his teeth into the succulent neck of his fairy fantasy, Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin). And the really steamy scenes — such as when Sookie forces both Eric and her former boyfriend, Vampire Bill to service her sexually — end up being just dreams.
In her diary, Anais Nin described her yearning for explosive first encounters thus: “To be violated is a need of woman, a secret erotic desire.” She was humble enough to speak only of her gender, but most men can think of at least one person who inspires in them “a secret erotic desire” to ravish them.
That was the fearful rush of blood southwards inspired in me by Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep…
and Brigitte Bardot, first in … And God Created Woman
and then again in Contempt.
They had real power. The stars of today — Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz, Anne Hathaway, Keira Knightley — are all too nice. 24-hour celebrity culture has meant we know them too well. We’re too close to them for them to hold the distance that desire needs. The closest thing to a credible femme fatale today is Angelina Jolie, and she’s just too weird to let her tie you up.
A similar castration has taken place with the male actors. The masculinity of Brando and Heston has been replaced with the feminized vulnerability of Pitt and Depp. Sean Connery’s proudly hairy chest has been downgraded to Daniel Craig’s waxed pecs.
Two of the finest lust-at-first sight scenes in celluloid history are worth watching just to remind you what you are missing. The first is from John Dahl’s The Last Seduction (1994), where the smouldering Linda Fiorentino is on the prowl for a Real Man. When a candidate approaches her in a bar, claiming he’s “hung like a horse”, she makes sure she won’t be wasting her time. Watch it here, starting at 3 mins in — taking particular note of her attention to olfactory detail, and her prudent plumbing demands.
Click here to view the embedded video.
The second is from Lindsay Anderson’s If…. (1968), a first meeting between the feral Malcolm McDowell and the luminous Christine Noonan. Like a tango dance, the power shifts thrillingly from man to woman, and then back again…
Click here to view the embedded video.
Where do they make ‘em like that these days?
