ABSTRACT
Hardly a season passes without news about a controversial art-house film. At the 2010 Cannes film festival, Ça commence par la fin (It Begins with the End, dir. Michaël Cohen) caused a stir: It featured the actors (and real-life pair) Emmanuelle Béart and Michael Cohën having sex in extreme closeup. In spite of the furor—The Observer ran a notice entitled “Outrage as French couple’s film judged too sexy for Cannes” 1 —this “shock” is perennial. The previous year it was over Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, in which Willem Defoe’s penis is made to ejaculate blood; in 2004 Michael Winter-bottom’s 9 Songs “disgusted” for its depictions of live coitus; and two years earlier Gaspar Noé was the bête noire for the twelve-minute rape of Monica Bellucci’s character in Irréversible (2002). Whether the next incarnation in the “Asia Extreme” DVD series or Michael Haneke’s latest provocation, these films are ubiquitous on the festival circuit and in cinemas and appear reliably in the media cycle—often accompanied by a critic, politician, or lobby group’s consternation at how these productions might deform our brains or our impressionable children. 2
