Even mainstream offerings are quickly steaming up the screen. Last year's The
Banquet, for instance, featured a shot of the naked back of actress Zhang Ziyi
- a body double, as it turned out - and earned the martial arts movie an NC16
rating when it was shown in Singapore.
Merely titillating? Or is Asian cinema going through a revisionist phase in
which flaunting sex and sensuality is no longer taboo?
It certainly looks that way. Mainland Chinese director Lou Ye's Summer Palace,
for instance, is billed as the most daring film to come out of the country and
contains explicit sex scenes involving its two leads, Hao Lei and Guo Xiadong.
Lou, 42, has confessed: "Love is a very complicated form of communication
between two people, and it cannot exclude sex."
What he failed to mention, of course, is that his depiction of sex is more
overt than older film-makers like Zhang Yimou in Ju Dou (1990).
This could well be a sign of changing social mores in the Middle Kingdom, if a
recent survey of 2,300 high school students in Beijing is anything to go by.
The Times reported in January that six per cent of these students had already
had their first sexual experience. About 30 per cent said that teenage sex was
fine, as long as it was consensual. Of course, such statistics may not figure
consciously in Lou's aesthetic. But they're certainly refracted through his
work.
A similar openness towards sex in the city is also giving rise to a new wave of
film-makers in Taiwan-inspired, no doubt, by Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based
auteur, Tsai Ming Liang. In award-winning art-house fare like Vive L'Amour
(1994) and The Wayward Cloud (2005), Tsai plays out sex as a brutal force of
nature.
For instance, in his latest effort, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, there's a
sequence in which a man and a woman masturbate each other wordlessly, almost
contemptuously, in a cul-de-sac.
Taking their cue from Tsai's noholds-barred approach is a spate of Taiwanese
gay-themed films, starting with Formula 17 (2004), a low budget production that
took home NT$8.4 million ($383,880) at the box office. Eternal Summer, even
topped the box office in Taiwan at one point.
The Asian filmmaker's treatment of sex is now in your face, up close and very
personal - even in Singapore, where the powers are to a certain extent, bending
with the wind.
The Singapore Film Commission (SFC), for instance, offered director Sun Koh a
$3,000-grant to make Bedroom Dancing. Rated R21 and passed without cuts, the
short film opens with an explicit scene of a heartlander couple making out in
various positions. Such a film wouldnˇ¦t have been made five years ago - at
least not with money from the SFC anyway.
Some hot buttons, though, still remain out of bounds. Kan Lume's gay film,
Solos, was rated R21 but still received three cuts.
TODAY
