When we hear about a movie that’s caused upper-crust audience members to walk out half way through clutching their pearls, it officially has our attention.
And when the challenging material in question just so happens to be envelope-pushing gay sex scenes, well, where do we buy out tickets?
Camille Vidal-Naquet’s new film Sauvage (to be released as Wild in the US) did just that at this years Cannes Film Festival, but on top of the salacious nature of the “controversy”, it also received critical acclaim for its honest and painful exploration of the life of a young gay prostitute.
It centers around 22-year-old Leo, who has been working the streets in France. He’s played by the very talented (and very cute) Félix Maritaud, who you may remember as Max from last year’s incredible BPM.
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Vidal-Naquet has talked about the graphic content with the press, calling it “honest.”
Check out the trailer for Wild (Sauvage) below:
Kangol
I def want to see it. A number of non-US, non-porn feature films have depicted graphic gay sex, though. Just think of Homme au Bain/Man at Bath, Stranger by the Lake, Grande Ecole, O Fantasma, Weekend, Criminal Lovers, Greek Pete, etc., as have some US ones like Shortbus. I do wish, though, that gay filmmakers including gay sex in their films could focus more on gay people older than their late teens and 20s, and not fall back on the hustler scenario so often. It’s been a staple since Paul Morrissey’s 1968 film Flesh, hasn’t it?
GentlemanCaller
It’s back in the Pleistocene (or 1980), but Taxi zum Klo was about grown-ups.
hansniemeijer
I’ll be part of an audience happy to walk in.
cynicalsteve
The headline is misleading. It makes it sound like the trailer had gay sex scenes in it. Dumb click bait again.
Mick406
Yep! Another false alarm!
scotshot
It states the movie has gay sex scenes and that was the trailer for the film. Not too hard to understand, is it?
Claude
I knew there had to be more to it than vanilla sex. From Variety:
“A scene with a couple of bored, heavily pierced sadists who treat him like an animal is hard to watch, with use of a sex toy that’s anything but playful. Mercifully, an encounter with a well-heeled client into ‘blood and torture,’ which has been telegraphed so insistently that it inevitably represents rock bottom for strung-out Leo, is played out offscreen, showing us only the grisly aftermath.”
djmcgamester
The real question is how important is it to show explicit sex scenes in any movie. They don’t bother me, and, sure, they’re nice to see, but is it important? “God’s Own Country”, one of my favorite gay movies, doesn’t have explicit sexual scenes. (Sure, there’s the one scene with the blow job, but we don’t actually see anything.) There’s also some non-sexual nudity. NBD.
Sex isn’t, nor should it be, something shameful. At the same time, I’m jut as happy to see a “fade to black” type of situations. We know it’s happening but the visual aspect isn’t present. I know people will have differing opinions, which is fine, but this is my take.
Kangol
Sometimes explicit sex and nudity are central to the director’s or screenwriter’s or author’s vision, so it’s necessary. To take one example along the lines of this film, in the novel *In My Room,* the late French writer Guillaume Dustan wrote quite evocatively about a gay man, living with HIV and approaching middle age, had structured his life around going to clubs and having lots of sex, and his descriptions of sex, graphic, deadpan and unsentimental, are central to themes of the novel and to his aesthetic. It’s not prurient at all. To take a US film counterpart, Bruce LaBruce’s film *L.A. Zombie*, starring François Sagat, is about a queer, homeless drifter who might be schizophrenic, and how he moves through LA’s streets and nightscapes, including his sexual experiences, which are graphic and which represent one of his key forms of human contact. A third example is the late queer Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s *Salò*, about the depraved fascist quasi-state in Italy towards the end of the 2nd World War. Pasolini depicts the right-wingers’ hypocrisy by showing the extremity of their perversions; it’s central to the story. In all three cases, no graphic sex would pretty much cancel out of the core of these works. Sometimes you need to be explicit, sometimes not.
Kevan1
This is a movie about a street hustler. SEX is his world and the twisted world of physical power over one person or the relinquishing of ones power to another for money. That is his life, His world, in general, has nothing to do with love. So what should the movie show? Happy gay men in love traveling the world in constant bliss singing Broadway musicals?
fur_hunter
Gratuitous sex scenes in movies, books, you name it are ridiculous and unnecessary. I believe they are only in them because the storyline sucks and can’t stand on its own. If you are going to do PORN….DO PORN and have all the sex scenes you want. If you are doing a serious film or book, you leave out gratuitous sex and stick to the storyline. Leave any sex scenes to the reader’s imagination. I have written ten novels so far with two of them in print. I was told by someone who has read them that they were glad there were none because they would have ruined the whole feel of the stories. So…..That’s my opinion. And as my mother tells me. “Opinions are like @$$holes. Everyone has one.”
ElPillo
Agreed, and in this movie they seem gratuitous.
scotshot
Thanks for your opinion. What’s your pen name? How many were actually published? Should I assume you self publish?
StraightnNarrow
I don’t have to watch the trailer to know that it is just another film depicting deranged gays having revolting and disgusting sex, not to mention how it glorifies male prostitution. This movie should definitely be banned in the US.
mrbaze
Yes. By all means ban things you don’t like. That’s a fine plan. Sex is only revolting and disgusting if you’re not very good at it–that’s why we love our practice sessions.
Virpilosus
Suggestion: Try putting your nom de plume in ALL CAPS, so we can be SURE of your true intentions… And then promptly ignore your “straight narrowness.”
Paco
Man you have some bad issues with sex.
jpcolter
Blah blah blah troll. Blah blah blah.
Kangol
Rev. Mother StraightnNarrow a/k/a Church Lady CastleSF, you aren’t fooling anyone. We know you’re a gay freak between the sheets. Deranged is code for the real you, and revolting and digusting is code for what I like to engage in. The very thought of male sex work, especially of the rough trade kind, probably makes your bloomers catch fire.
ElPillo
It shouldn’t be banned but it seems an unimportant movie similar to dozens that present the same issue, just a little less interesting.
1898
YOU should be banned in the US
Kevan1
BOY! NARROW IS RIGHT.
scotshot
You have an active imagination and can fantasize your own fetishistic “revolting and disgusting sex”?
OzJosh
1) There’s nothing remotely “upper crust” about audiences in Cannes. They’re critics, journos and film execs from around the world – just regular dudes at a trade show.
2) Cannes audiences have seen everything. They’d never walk out because of sex scenes. It would be the violence that did it – and by walking out they’re making a point about that.
ElPillo
Or a bad movie…
Lacuevaman
ElPillo, you make the most sense here in this string of silly queens…
IWantAFullBeard
I walked out of a coffee shop this last weekend in Boulder, CO after two straight people starting making out in front of me. Who wants to watch that nasty stuff?
Kevan1
Because watching a movie is a choice, watching two breeders going at it in public is not a choice.
Terrycloth
I wish it were dubbed rather than subtitled. TLA gay has alot ot great titles but rarely mention if they are subtitled so I hate to chance it.. i prefer to enjoy it rather than either miss what’s on screen or have to go back because i missed dialouge. Unfortunately most gay movies are foriegn
Guess I’m in the minority of wanting dubbed movies than subtitled
Mozo83
I bet you are. Doesn’t the not-synching of the lips to language bother you? That’s why I prefer subs. And I like picking up foreign words here and there.
scotshot
I’ve seen both the original French and English dubbed versions of “La Cage Aux Follles” among many foreign films. Something is lost in translation. Learn to read faster.
batesmotel
There is obviously another reason they walked out, and it couldn’t have been about the gay sex involved. They’ve seen numerous gay oriented films that depicted that and films on prostitution and loved it. So there’s something else that’s missing with this story. It’s likely exaggerated. It could’ve just been boring. The Cannes Film Festival people see everything and can handle everything, so they didn’t walk because of the gay sex. That’s ridiculous.
Kangol
People at Cannes walked out of Gaspar Noe’s 2002 film Irreversible, if I remember correctly, because of the film’s depiction of a brutal bashing in the gay bar, a hetero rape scene, which was simulated and not real, lasted for an extended period, and more. I can’t hyperlink, but some viewers allegedly became physically ill. I doubt Sauvage approaches that one, though, or Noe’s earlier I Stand Alone, which was also extremely disturbing.
StraightnNarrow
All these disturbing films that you listed should have been banned from distribution. They do absolutely no good to the society and are nothing but sugar-coated poison to the human heart.
Tête Carrée
@StraightnNothing,
You “don’t have to watch the trailer bla bla bla…deranged gays having revolting and disgusting sex”? That’s because you got all your terms and ideas from the Holier Than Thou (fake) Christian Handbook.
You and your kind should add “Peach Molesters” to your vocabulary because the last gay film I saw was completely sanitized to get it into tight-ass American theatres. Unlike bitter angry hetero films where they can fuck in front of children.
mujerado
Hey, StraightnNarrow, you seem to be in favor of banning some films, so answer this seriously. Whom do you trust to make the decision of what you can or cannot see? Whose standards should be used as the dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable? Sorrry, I don’t trust anyone to do that, and neither do most Americans. It’s not our way.
QueerTruth
I can’t speak to the film. But I’m rather tired of gay films about hustlers. Regardless of how “street rough” films try to depict the life of prostitute, gay or straight mind you, the films also glamorizes the life style.
And I’m over that. It’s hell on earth.
mz.sam
Whoa, another gay themed French film (again) featuring unattractive actors with unappealing naked bodies…YAWN! Instead, check out ‘Steel’…fascinating story, good acting, hot actors.
tomasamot
If by Steel, you mean Chad Connell & Daniel Cameron? Good looking? Serious?
DHT
Anyone who walked out on this trailer should probably not be going to movies anyways.
DHT
Actually, I just got it…they walked out of the movie not the trailer…sorry the title of the article confused me…
rray63
You have to remember, the person that wrote this article does have an agenda. We all know that the people that watch these things are for the most part the most liberal on the planet. If they walked out, it wasn’t because they saw a man pretending to fuck another man. Could it be and I’m sure this is a stretch, that the movie sucked? As audience members we have conflated the worth of a gay themed movie with how much sex is in it. I don’t mind a love scene but after a bit it gets to be too much. If we want to watch a porn, well heck, there is plenty of porn out there to watch. A subdued love scene is okay, but let’s not get carried away.
tomasamot
There might be agenda here, as the article is missing important facts along with misinformation. It was “several woman” that walked out – not “audiences”
Found elsewhere “When a certain scene involving a giant butt plug, a hustler, and two very nasty johns, came on the screen at the Sauvage screening in Cannes, several women left the theater in disgust. “
sanguinewoods
Oh puh-leeeeeze. Poor little heteros. How many years have we in the LGBTQI community sat through ENDLESS numbers of graphic sex scenes between straight people in films? I’ll tell you how long: since film began. And you can Google they shit—but I guarantee you it’s a lotta years, Mac. That’s a long time for us gays to have to sit through you straights going down on your chick (um, not do much, thanks) in every fucking movie that’s ever hit the US silver screen since the 1960s with a PG or higher rating. It’s even implied in the G rating shit. Beauty and the Beast? Sleeping Beauty? I mean that Prince hacked his way through a thorn forest to get to that stereotypical blonde bombshell lying there prostrate in the Tower. You think all Daddy got that night was a peck? I don’t think so. Toughen up straight people. We’re tired of watching you slopping around naked and sweaty on our men and women like a pride of horned up sea lions. Sit back and relax and let a sexy homo show you how a blow job is done. ?
screwtop
I don’t get why people who froth at the mouth at the spectacle of gay sex drift into a cinema screening a film like this. What happened? – did they fall asleep during a screening of a Disney cartoon and wake up to see this film on the screen instead?
Or are they visitors from some kind of looney religious sect, that turned up to censor what was going on? – found they were morally outraged? – and went off like Krakatoa?
And I don’t get why someone’s “opinion” means anything. “Opinions” are a peculiar notion -everyone has them, but they are incapable of being either “right” OR “wrong”. They just agree or disagree. But they don’t prove a thing.