From ‘Babygirl’ to ‘Queer’ and ‘Emmanuelle,’ Erotic Movies are Back

This year’s Venice Film Festival lineup was not only the starriest in recent history, it was also the steamiest. Literally and figuratively. Aside from the brutal heatwave that plagued festivalgoers, the roster was filled with sexually charged movies, ranging from “Babygirl,” starring Nicole Kidman, to Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” with Daniel Craig. Elsewhere in the festival circuit, Audrey Diwan’s “Emmanuelle” is kicking off San Sebastian, while Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia,” which opened at Cannes, is playing at virtually every major fest this fall.

But like Kidman’s character in “Babygirl” who only gets triggered when something is at stake, erotic movies in 2024 aren’t created as mere entertainment as they once were; they exist to push boundaries and break down clichés revolving mainly around female and gay protagonists.

“Babygirl,” directed by Dutch helmer Halina Reijn (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”), tackles the complexity of female sexuality and the issue of consent which resonates in this post #Metoo era; while “Queer,” starring Craig and Drew Starkey, challenges preconceived notions around homosexuality, masculinity and self-acceptance.

Kidman, who previously delivered memorable performances in sexually charged movies such as ”Eyes Wide Shut” and “The Paperboy,” said at the film’s Venice press conference that Reijn’s “female gaze” guided her to tell a story that is “liberating for women,” as touches on many topics, including “marriage, truth, power, consent.”

In “Babygirl,” she plays a high-powered CEO who puts her job and picture-perfect family on the line when she engages into a torrid affair with an intern (Harry Dickinson), who taps into her darkest fantasies.

“It’s told by a woman, through her gaze — Halina [Reijn] wrote it and she directed it — and that’s to me what made it so unique because suddenly I was going to be in the hands of a woman with this material. It was very dear to our shared instincts and very freeing,” Kidman said at the presser.

As Venice programmer Alberto Barbera points it out in an interview with Variety, the storyline of “Babygirl” underscores the cultural shift and gendered power dynamics that have been put in motion since the start of the #MeToo movement in 2007. “This same theme – of an affair between a woman and much young man in a workplace environment — would have ended very differently 20 or 30 years ago,” says Barbera, adding that that the female character “would have been punished” for her “illicit behavior.”

The movie also deals with adultery; a topic that has traditionally been tackled from a male perspective depicting female characters as either saints or dangerous nymphomaniacs, with notorious examples such as the cult Michael Douglas-Glen Close thriller “Fatal Attraction.” In “Babygirl,” the person who threatens the sacro-saint family is a younger man.

“Queer,” meanwhile, is an adaptation of the William S Burroughs novel starring Craig as William Lee, an American expat in 1950’s Mexico who becomes infatuated with a younger man (Drew Starkey) who’s believed to be straight. In the film, Craig’s character admits that he once struggled with his own biais towards homosexuality before embracing it, and implies that Eugene might be repressing his true desires to conform to social expectations. Unlike the suggestive “Call Me By Your Name,” “Queer” has a few explicit sex scenes which Craig said he and Starkey “wanted to make (…) as touching and as real and as natural as (they) possibly could.”

Guadagnino, who has largely contributed to the resurgence of erotic movies within the last decades with “Call Me By Your Name” and “Challengers,” says that “puritanism and all of this has been very strong in the past few years” and the “idea of representation – and at the same time the idea of what’s possible and what’s not possible – has been intensely debated.” Yet, Guadagnino says he doesn’t think that “eroticism ever abandoned cinema because good cinema is always erotic.”

But the reality is that erotic films, which once flooded multiplexes in the 1990’s, became increasingly scarce in the decades that followed, especially in Hollywood. And like with most decisions ruling the movie business, it all came down to profitability.

Karina Longworth, a film historian and creator of the “You Must Remember This” podcast, links Hollywood’s erotic movies boom of the 1980s and early 90s to a form of imitation as flattery.

“[In Hollywood] it’s more common to say this worked in the past, so this will work again. And so that’s why when you have movies like [1987’s] ‘Fatal Attraction’ starting to make money, you get basically a five or six year wave of movies that are a version of that.”

On the heels of Adrian Lyne’s “Fatal Attraction,” star Michael Douglas became closely associated with the genre, heading subsequent successes like Barry Levinson’s “Disclosure” and starring alongside Sharon Stone in Paul Verhoeven’s smash hit “Basic Instinct,” which grossed $352.9 million worldwide and became the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1992. But just as many of these efforts didn’t reach those same highs.

Verhoeven’s follow-up “Showgirls” is the best “example of trying to replicate that success [of ‘Basic Instinct’] and failing,” says Longworth, who dedicated an entire series of her podcast to erotic films from the 1980’s and 1990’s.

“‘Showgirls’ lost so much money, but also became an instant joke. ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ was similar. There was so much speculation as to what this movie was going to be before anybody saw it, and nobody saw it until right before it came out,” said Longworth. “People were disappointed, and they were not able to see it clearly because it was so different from their expectations. So a lot of money was spent on, but it didn’t make its money back.

“In an environment where people are primarily doing things for money, you need to reach the largest number of people possible, so it makes sense that you’d recoil away from something like that,” she says.

The increasing prevalence of adult content available on the internet over the last thirty years has also made the theatrical prospects for erotic movies less likely.

“There is this sense of compartmentalization, where [depictions of sex] are things that you can watch at home in privacy or with your partner,” says Longworth.

Still today, while streaming services have opened up opportunity for ancillary revenues for erotic films, distributors favoring theatrical are being cautious about acquiring movies with significant sexual content.

Distributors, such as Dylan Leiner at Sony Pictures Classics, tend to assume that these movies are seldom tailored for theaters because “people would rather see them at home.” There are exceptions with big hits such as Sam Taylor-Johnson’s “Fifty Shades of Grey,” but Leiner says it’s based on a bestseller and therefore had a “built-in audience.” SPC did buy Verhoeven’s sexy revenge thriller “Elle” out of Cannes in 2017 and while the movie earned its leading lady Isabelle Huppert an Oscar nomination among a flurry of accolades, it performed modestly in cinemas (grossing an estimated $12.4 million worldwide).

There’s also the assumption that erotic films aren’t made for a “collective experience,” a notion that Frederic Boyer, the artistic director of Les Arcs and Tribeca film festivals, refutes. Boyer says he showed Reijn’s subversive 2019 film “Instinct” starring Carice van Houten at Les Arcs Film Festival and it proved to be a highlight of the selection. “People really loved it and came out of the theater looking happy. It was a memorable screening,” Boyer says.

Another obvious factor that has played against erotic cinema is the fear from directors of inappropriately depicting sexuality or mishandling sex scenes in the aftermath of #MeToo.

A notorious example of a filmmaker who raised several red flags is straight director Abdellatif Kechiche who made the lesbian romance “Blue is the Warmest Color” and was accused by Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos of mishandling a sex scene that took 10 days to film and was mainly improvised. His “male gaze” also came under criticism.

None of these challenges and pitfalls have stopped well-established male directors from making erotic films in Europe, for instance Verhoeven with “Elle” and “Benedetta;” Lars von Trier with “Nymphomaniac” and “Antichrist;” and Gaspard Noe with “Love” and “Irreversible,” among others. (It’s interesting to note that all of them, including Kechiche’s “Blue is the Warmest Color,” world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.) But it seems that younger filmmakers like Reijn and Audrey Diwan, and thought-provoking gay helmers such as Guadagnino and Guiraudie are now leading the way and making films that appeal to a younger generation of audiences. The latter’s best-known movie “Stranger by the Lake” broke ground at Cannes in 2013 with its explicit scenes and exploration of queer desire. Guiraudie says the movie resonated widely because it has “something to do with a kind of universality of an intimate experience.” Although it depicts gay characters, the movie is about desire and death, “things that concern everyone.”

But in an industry that’s still dominated by men, female directors tackling eroticism in unconventional ways are still facing challenges. Diwan, who will next present “Emmanuelle,” based on the famous eponymous erotic novel by Emmanuelle Arsan on the opening night of the San Sebastian Film Festival, says she faced some “reluctance” with the project.

The film tells the story of a woman looking for a lost pleasure and was conceived as an exploration of pleasure, rather than a film satisfying a male fantasy like the previous “Emmanuelle” movies.

Diwan says she wanted to “propose this idea of ​​women today, as I feel, not a young girl, but a 35-year-old woman, and explore her quest,” but that approach was “disturbing to some people.” She says she received “wonderful support from my producers and Pathe in France,” but “there was still a battle with the industry,” Diwan said. “There is the question of pleasure onscreen and then, there is also something about the woman’s pleasure.”

Manlio Gomarasca, a film producer and editor-in-chief of the film mag Nocturno Cinema, says Diwan may have ruffled feathers because before her project, all the “‘Emmanuelle’ movies were helmed by male directors for a mostly male audience, so they all feature a male gaze in describing the sensuality and unbridled sexuality of a woman,” says Gomarasca.

Ultimately, Diwan is part of a new generation of female directors representing sexuality, sensuality and intimacy against the backdrop of the MeToo movement.

Citing “The Substance” by French director Coralie Fargeat and Noemie Merlant’s “The Balconettes,” Gomarasca says both movies underline the fact that these days in France the exploitation of the naked female body reaches its pinnacle only in films made by female directors. And the erotic movies they’re making often have a political dimension.

Despite fears and profitability concerns, some distributors are embracing the boldest entries, as long as they come with topnotch directors and/or A-list actors on board. At Venice, for instance, A24, which will release “Babygirl” on Christmas, picked up “Queer” ahead of its world premiere.

Matteo Rovere, who directed Netflix series “Supersex” and presented the film “Diva Futura” in competition at Venice, says he “believes that the market is ready for all this.”

Rovere, who explores the Rome porn film studio run by entrepreneur Riccardo Schicchi during the 1980s in “Diva Futura,” says the resurgence of erotic films sees filmmaking trying “to maintain the freshness of its story, the uniqueness of its approach and the constant ability to create art by speaking to audiences using a totally new language.”

Guiraudie predicts that the “question of intimacy” in cinema will be co-opted by mainstream cinema, not just in Europe but also in Hollywood, because “we live in a world that’s increasingly individualistic and increasingly self-centered.”

“Artists have new areas to explore, and the same goes for the market. I don’t know if [mainstream cinema] will last long with just Marvel,” says Guiraudie. “There’s a lot of remaking and over-exploitation of sequels and prequels. So I think the market also needs to find other sources of spectacle. Eroticism is one of them.”