THIS is an open letter to all. (I know, I know — very boomer of me! I could have at least used the Notes app to be more relevant to these times. But it is what it is.) First off, I wasn’t paid enough to be on the sets of these productions. It felt like I was a last minute addition to the budget line of the production costs. I didn’t have enough time to actually do my job, therefore, these films aren’t my best work. And I most definitely won’t be putting them down on my resume. If you’re wondering about the sets I’ve been on, you’ll just have to type “steamy” or “erotic” into the searchbox of your preferred streaming service. I’d suggest you’d avoid them but now you’ve been told not to, you definitely will be looking them up. Naughty, naughty. Also, oh so predictable!
Let’s be honest: people having sex isn’t particularly pretty at all. It’s messy, mechanical but could also be magical. My job is to work with everyone on the film’s set to achieve some semblance to the real thing. I’ve got to make it all happen in a room filled with cameras and crew; with actors who might not even know each other — forget like each other; and a director who is the only one with the image in his head. If I’ve got enough lead up time to shoot the sex scene, I might even be able to change the picture in the director’s mind. And in these productions I referred to, I wasn’t able to achieve that at all. I shudder, shiver and shake to think that so many of you will think this is how sex happens. Well, it doesn’t. Rather, it would be best to avoid these moves and methods in one’s own sexual situations.
Maybe if I give you an example of this genre of bad sex on screen, you’ll avoid the rest? Skip Netflix’s Obsession. It is the latest to use gratuitous sex to hook viewers, but never actually deliver anything else of substance. Worse, even the sex scenes are bad. They’re very, very bad. Perhaps you’ll laugh at all of the silliness. Let me lay out the premise for you: there’s rich doctor William Farrow (Richard Armitage) and Ingrid — his barrister wife — played by the superlative Indira Varma, who is completely wasted in this series. I hope she at least got a fat paycheque. I mean, the directors could have just asked her for some tips, instead of completely ignoring all of my suggestions. Well, basically the doctor sahib starts sleeping with his son Jay’s (Rish Shah) girlfriend, Anna (Charlie Murphy). Yes, you’re right — you don’t have to mutter the phrase below your breath, say it aloud. Let’s say it together: the plot is completely ridonkulous!
Now for the sex scenes that string together this series: each is progressively worse than the preceding one. The encounters (seems like the right word in this instance) between William and Anna are godawful. I tried to work it out with them — that BDSM isn’t just about being blindfolded and bound. It’s about the desire to dominate, to set oneself up for submission — and these actions are powered by consent and not by control. But with no time scheduled for rehearsals of these scenes, this duo continues to perpetuate the basest ideas of this beautiful sexual practice. Getting these scenes so entirely wrong seems about right: the central couple of the series hasn’t been understood, how can the sex between them be understood at all?
The worst scene though, the one I tried to prevent the most, is embarrassing even to mention. William checks into the same fancy hotel room in Paris as the one previously occupied by his son and his girlfriend — William’s lover too. Once inside, he begins to greedily seek out of her smell on the sheets and the pillows. Doesn’t he realise that in such hotels the bedding is changed between guests? It’s certainly obvious to us all. But then, like a truffle pig, he finds a trace of her on a tiny ornate pillow and quickly descends into a frenzy. He begins to frantically undo his clothes, struggling with his belt buckle before dry humping the bed. I was aghast watching this on the monitors… I tried to intervene but the directors seemed satisfied with the shot. It is horrifying to watch, not because it captures a sliver of humanity seldom seen, but because it ends up becoming a mockery of that precise thing.
In the last episode of this thankfully short series — it’s just four parts — Ingrid, Varma’s character, says, “I see how irrelevant I have become to you. And I will take considerable strength from that.” I wish I had that kind of moral fibre. Instead, the return of these kinds of sexploitation projects means my role is more necessary now than ever. Next time, I won’t be sitting back quietly while they play the fool and remove the fun from sex on screens. Just you see!
