The strong documentary Can I touch you? (The Hour of the Wolf, NPO 2) is about sex scenes, but there is not a single sex scene. Instead, director Tamar van den Dop meticulously films the faces of Dutch actors watching their own sex scene, against a black background. In the reflection of their eye you can sometimes vaguely see what they see. Furthermore, we only hear panting and cries. The actors look concentrated, embarrassed, usually with some disgust. One actress cries.
Three are enthusiastic – they are proud of their sex scene. Hannah Hoekstra has fond memories of a rape scene. A stunt coach had taught her how to safely hang from her opponent’s strangling arm. “It looked very intense. It was great.” Peter Faber is also enthusiastic. He is the only one who wants to see his scene again. He watches sex between naked older people – breaking taboos, he is proud of that.
These three are exceptions. The others tell a sad story. There is usually little in the script about sex scenes. “They fuck intensely and hungrily” is already an unusually extensive stage direction. The director usually has no idea either, or finds it too embarrassing to deal with. Or even worse: he believes in naturalness, spontaneity. Furthermore, it appears that directors often have an unrealistic, clichéd, in short, male view of sex. Almost all actresses say their scenes ended up on porn sites.
The actors are often left to their own devices – “just do your thing” – which they consider extremely unsafe. Almost all of them dread filming sex scenes. The lack of guidance is distressing because these are the most intimate, vulnerable scenes that actors have to do. Partly because the line between being and playing is thin. What helps, they say, is to agree everything carefully in advance, preferably with an intimacy coordinator, a newcomer in the film world: “I would have allowed myself and others to do that much earlier.”
Nuances
Tamar van der Top – herself an actress – has selected a beautiful, diverse group of film actors, who together discuss all the nuances of the issue. On one side of the spectrum is the older actor Jeroen Krabbé. Everything used to be freer and more relaxed, he says. Sex in films of the 1970s contributed to the sexual liberation of the Netherlands. Nobody made a fuss about that. He abhors contemporary ‘prudishness’. “It’s like Queen Victoria is back again.”
At the other end of the spectrum is the young Nora El Koussour, the actress who cries when she sees her sex scene again. She paid the price that a white man like Krabbé never has to pay. She was promised that she could still see her sex scene in the montage so that she could intervene. That promise was ignored, making the scene longer and more explicit than she wanted. The scene caused her major problems in the Dutch-Moroccan community. She says she was spat at on the train. “I just don’t understand why this had to be shown for so long. So humiliating.”
In the middle are seasoned actresses such as Georgina Verbaan and Rifka Lodeizen, who look back with some surprise, sometimes even amusement, at what they tolerated because they did not want to make things difficult. Lodeizen: “I was also there myself.”
The real solution is: do it yourself. Actress Hanna van Vliet herself had a major share in the queer series and film Anne+. She proudly returns to a sex scene with a lesbian woman and a nonbinary person. Groundbreaking because it was realistic sex, because the scene was clearly embedded in the story, and because it supported the trans community.