Late evening, in a restaurant somewhere, and the conversation turns to kissing. And film. One of the group, a celebrated historian, regales the assembled friends with a tale of how, in his 1950s boyhood, the films of the era led him to think that a fierce gum-to-gum press with a tightly closed mouth was how it’s done.
Films, we all agreed, teach eager kids about sex — as well as about relationships and the wider world. Now we have to extend that remit to all sorts of screens: these days, television is often more sexually explicit than mainstream cinema. And then there’s the whole online world.
But what do they teach? It seems odd, given the apparent prevalence of sex in our swipe-right culture, but Hollywood films now portray less sex than at any time since the 1960s, according to some commentators. Distributors don’t want an adults-only rating, it seems, and there’s a nervousness about different cultures. In some parts of the world you can’t show a passionate kiss, although it’s no problem to show someone’s head being blown off.
You could call it Puritanism (children of the Sixties do) or you could call it increased awareness of the dark side of sexual freedoms. The #MeToo movement has prompted the emergence of a new professional in the film industry: the intimacy co-ordinator. The “IC” helps to direct sex scenes, basically, just as fight directors coach actors in swordplay and biffing.
Let’s say it, right away — the comic potential of an intimacy co-ordinator is almost limitless. Especially for people like me who think that sex is more often than not very funny. The new TV show Ten Percent — a Brit spin-off of the great French series Call My Agent! — gets stuck in, in an early episode, with a hilariously cringeworthy scene in which an IC is trying to coach a pair of reluctant actors: “Now move your hand up . . . no, no, not there . . . ”
Just the term itself is enough to float a thousand quips: look around and you’ll see so many areas where intimacy needs co-ordinating (Vladimir Putin’s conference table?) and so many 21st-century growth industries devoted to just that (dating sites? psychotherapy?).
But beyond coaxing inept actors into pretending to love each other, the ICs are there for their protection. In recent years a parade of big names — Nicole Kidman, Alicia Vikander, Claire Foy, Ruth Wilson and more — have come out to talk about feeling exploited (certainly emotionally, sometimes physically) during close-quarters performance. So the ICs, somewhere between a choreographer (as they often describe themselves), an umpire and a therapist, have plenty to do.
The advent of the ICs is a very long way from the bad old days: in 1986, a heart-wrenching article in The New York Times revealed the trauma of Kim Basinger when she made 9½ Weeks — when director Adrian Lyne apparently did everything he could to ramp up the actress’s fear and anxiety so that the sex scenes would be supercharged. Basinger, like Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris and so many others, was at the mercy of a male director and male co-star in situations that amounted to outright abuse.
FTWeekend Festival: US edition
Jan Dalley will be speaking at the inaugural US edition of the FTWeekend Festival on May 7. The one-day event, ‘The Bigger Picture: a global take on the ideas stimulating, diverting — and unsettling — our age’, features leading authors, scientists, politicians and of course FT writers. Limited passes available at ftweekendfestival.com
Quite a number of ICs seem to be former fight directors — the synergies are obvious. Among them, Lizzy Talbot, IC on Bridgerton and choreographer of some memorably steamy moments between Phoebe Dynevor and Regé-Jean Page, has pointed out the logic of her career shift: “There are so many protocols and procedures and techniques when working with violence, yet there were absolutely none when working with intimacy.”
Protection on one side of the camera is important: it’s even more so at the consumers’ end of things. The 5Rights Foundation, brainchild of Beeban Kidron (herself a film-maker, and a member of the House of Lords) has recently scored a win in its quest to protect children and young people from screen harms of all sorts. After successfully introducing UK legislation to force companies to consider children’s protection in the design of digital services, it’s going international: there was a vote in California’s State Assembly last month in support of its Age Appropriate Design Code. And on May 16, the 5Rights Foundation launches its Global Child Online Safety Toolkit, with advocates from the UN, EU, Africa and more.
If young people are going to learn about life — including sex — from their screens, it needs to be in safety. After that, there’s always summer camp.
Email Jan at [email protected]
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