Jane Weinstock is a director and writer based in New York City. Her most recent film, Three Birthdays, received the NYWIFT narrative director award at the Woodstock Film Festival and is out now in theaters. It also won the best feature director award at the LA Femme International Film Festival. In 2013 she directed The Moment, a psychological thriller starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Alia Shawkat and Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The film premiered at The Tribeca Film Festival. Her feature directorial debut, Easy (2003), starring Marguerite Moreau, Brían F. O’Byrne, and Naveen Andrews, was an official selection at The Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals. Weinstock also co-directed Sigmund Freud’s Dora, a short film that showed at The Berlin International Film Festival and the Whitney Museum. She attended the Sundance Director’s Lab. In addition to directing, Weinstock has written on film, art, and feminism. She has a masters in Cinema Studies from NYU and a BA from Princeton.
To prepare for my new film, Three Birthdays, which takes place during the Sexual Revolution, I watched a lot of heterosexual sex scenes. I was drawn to films I had seen when I was growing up, and it was fascinating to see how they compared to my memory of them.
In Three Birthdays, which I also wrote, each of the three main characters (played by Josh Radnor, Annie Parisse and Nuala Cleary) has a different emotional experience of sex. Now, with the film being released, I’ve been asked a lot of questions about sex in the movies. Here are some of my thoughts on the subject.
I’ve always liked movies about sex. As a teenager, I loved The Graduate (1968). The romantic couple of the movie, Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross, never even have sex, just a few chaste kisses. All the sex is between Hoffman and Anne Bancroft (Katherine Ross’ mother), and it is funny and intentionally unsexy. In one of the best sex scenes ever, Mike Nichols, the director, creates a montage of moments from Hoffman and Bancroft’s first night at a hotel to days and weeks later, when Hoffman is lounging on a raft in his parents’ pool. The brilliance of the montage is that it doesn’t stop in the pool. It jumps back and forth in time (to Simon and Garfukel’s “Sound of Silence”), between Hoffman’s losing his virginity to his relaxing at his parents’ luxurious California home. At the end, Hoffman jumps onto his raft, at which point Nichols cuts to him landing on Anne Bancroft. We never really see sex happening, but the montage is funny and rapturous. (Another movie from the period with a great sex montage is Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 Don’t Look Now.)
If The Graduate was groundbreaking in its use of montage, it was also radical in showing an older woman having sex with a much younger man. Of course, older men having sex with much younger women wasn’t in the least unusual in 1968, but until recent years, older women in movies did not have sex with men half their age … unless they were paying for it. And they certainly did not initiate sex. Bancroft is an exception, but her aggressive sexuality is punished in the final scenes of the movie, where she is filmed to look unattractive, old and even monstrous.
If I took anything from The Graduate for Three Birthdays, it was the way the scenes achieved depth and insight by mixing sex and humor. I also used one of the most famous shots in the film as a reference in a scene where my 17-year-old character, played by Nuala Cleary, loses her virginity.
American Gigolo (1980) is another film about sex that I remember vividly. Again, a male point of view, but this time it’s Richard Gere as an “escort” who falls in love with one of his clients, Lauren Hutton. Although he is the protagonist, Gere is a sex object for the women in the film (many of whom are elderly!) and the women in the audience. In addition to showing Gere completely naked, front and back, one of the most sexual scenes in the film is a montage in which Gere decides what he’s going to wear that day. The camera pans over lovingly laid out jackets and ties, in much the same way it would over a man or woman’s body. Men’s clothing had never been featured in quite this way. Of course, clothing is usually considered a female concern. Was this scene primarily intended for a female viewer? It raises other questions: Am I supposed to identify with Richard Gere as a sex object (who likes beautiful clothes), or am I meant to desire him? Is he also an object for a gay male viewer? The answer, I think, is yes to all of these, which was why the film is so interesting.
In Three Birthdays, I tried not to objectify my characters, while at the same time revealing their desires. In the sex scenes, after showing the characters in wide shots having full-body sex, I focused on their faces and gave them dialogue so that they remained characters, not objects. Still, it was instructive to think about American Gigolo, where Gere’s desire only becomes palpable at the very end, when he is in jail, talking to Hutton through a glass barrier.
Another indelible sex film of my youth is Last Tango in Paris. Unlike The Graduate, it’s an older man and a very young woman. There is a lot of sex. And a rape. Marlon Brando, the dissolutely handsome “hero” of the film, anally rapes Maria Schneider with the help of a stick of butter. Are we supposed to identify with the perpetrator of the rape, who is still mourning his wife, who has committed suicide? Or do we relate to the young woman who is being violated? I certainly relate to the woman, especially knowing that the scene was not in the script and was improvised without preparing Schneider at all. The film is disturbing, especially knowing that Maria Schneider never really recovered from it.
Schneider is shown naked throughout Last Tango, while Brando never reveals his penis (although he talks about it constantly). Schneider arguably wins in the end when she shoots Brando, who at that moment is chewing gum and who has the presence of mind to go outside to a balcony and get rid of the gum before he drops dead. Is this what he deserves for his multiple acts of aggression against Schneider? Has she finally abandoned the masochistic desires she claimed to have?
I’m not sure I took anything from Last Tango for Three Birthdays, but it made a great impression on me when I first saw it. And it raises questions about female masochism that are still being asked today, but in different ways.
All of these movies were directed by men. Today, women are finally making films about sex. I saw Last Summer and Babygirl after finishing Three Birthdays, but I thought they would be intriguing to compare to The Graduate, American Gigolo and Last Tango. (Two really good films by women with lesbian sex are Chantal Akerman’s 1974 Je, Tu, Il, Elle and Angela Robinson’s 2017 Professor Marston and the Wonder Women.)
Last year’s Last Summer, by the French director Catherine Breillat, is the reverse of Last Tango: an older woman with a much younger man. (I noticed in the Last Tango credits that Breillat was an actress in the film!) The plot of Last Summer is simple: a successful lawyer in her 50s (Lea Drucker) has a passionate affair with her unstable 17-year-old stepson (Samuel Kircher). The sex scenes are particularly striking in the ways that they depict Drucker’s desire. Sometimes this means placing the camera virtually next to her head while she’s having sex, showing us exactly what she sees – her stepson becoming more and more aroused. At other times, Breillat focuses close up on Drucker’s face, her eyes closed, as she gets closer and closer to coming.
Last Summer raises a question that Three Birthdays also asks: Does heterosexual female desire destroy domestic life and therefore need to be contained? The end of the film is a surprising but implausible answer. Three Birthdays doesn’t put forward an answer.
Babygirl, also made by a woman, Halina Reijn, explores Nicole Kidman’s character’s masochistic desires from her point of view. She is a powerful woman, who almost has it all: two lovely children, a great job and a handsome, loving husband, Antonio Banderas, with whom she fakes orgasms. When a very young male intern at her company, Harris Dickinson, intuits her desire to be dominated, she reluctantly and then eagerly obliges. Dickinson has a subtly sadistic, raw sexual power that is more like Brando’s than Gere’s (like Brando in Last Tango, he also chews gum), although like Gere, he is at times objectified by the camera; in one scene he dances, shirtless, for Kidman in their hotel room, very much Kidman’s and our object of desire.
The film takes on female domination fantasies directly. Near the end of the movie, after Banderas and Dickinson have a fist fight while Kidman looks on, Banderas tries to speak for his wife: “Female masochism is nothing but a male fantasy.” Dickinson’s response: “That’s a dated idea of sexuality.” Interestingly, Kidman doesn’t offer an opinion. But Kidman’s view is the point of view of the film. The final sex scene of Babygirl, between Banderas and Kidman, provides her answer.
Three Birthdays is also about a powerful woman, played by Annie Parisse. She is not obviously masochistic and is in a relationship with a man (portrayed with perfect ambivalence by Josh Radnor) who is attracted to her power but fearful of losing his own. Unlike Kidman, Parisse enjoys being on top, both in bed and out. Is this a step in the right direction?
All of these films depict heterosexual female pleasure differently. But they all seem to struggle with the same question: What do women want? Freud asked the question more than a century ago, and the answer is still up for grabs.
