Etheral Contraband: ‘In Bed’ and ‘Better Than Sex’

The titles. The promotional posters. They elicit expectation, hinting promise of the pleasures of the pure mechanics of sex, if only at a grade below pornography. Something mildly erotic, but safe enough to avoid wandering behind the black curtain to retrieve. Things still left to the imagination, to some extent, in these films that boil down to two strangers hooking up for casual sex. Evident from the viewer reviews and commentary, it successfully drew in audiences.

A Netflix viewer who wrote a review of the Australian production, Better Than Sex suggested that the film captures an “evolution in relationships”, perhaps supporting that tow-line observation that younger generations have scoffed traditional commitment, existing in a comfortable limbo between physical satisfaction and the avoidance of emotional attachment. But this is nothing new, really. And, despite the so-called sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s, and probably even the 1980s, casual sex has once again become taboo. And, what to say about a non-pornographic movie that focuses on it entirely? American films, brimming with political correctness, have taught us that a happy ending means not only acceptance of commitment, but also monogamy, and more specifically with an extremely compatible lover.

Better Than Sex and its Chilean counterpart, In Bed, confront this re-established taboo of casual, consensual sex, doing so in a manner that fuses pure mechanics with intelligent discussion, one free of timidity and self-conscious giggling. In a way, they are generational films. The young couples of these films, both somewhere in their late 20s or early 30s, approach casual sex without guilt. In Bed begins just after two strangers who met when one offered to drive the other home after a party have had sex in a cheap motel. We are party to the grunts and heavy breathing and hints of naked, writhing strangers. That Bruno (Gonzalo Valenzuela) doesn’t know the name of the girl he just slept with (played by actress Blanca Lewin) doesn’t bother Daniella. She is amused by it rather than angered or ashamed. Names just pervert the anonymity and that is what the couples of both films initially seems so desperate to avoid–that messiness. There’s that age old fear of getting hurt. But, like many films where characters share an isolated setting for a significant duration (i.e. The Breakfast Club, Never on Tuesday, Tape), those connections are inevitable, invoking their delusional defenses by impersonalizing their time together. “It’s just fucking,” near-strangers Josh (David Wenham) and Cinthia (Susie Porter) half-heartedly assure themselves as the two grow closer in Better Than Sex.

Better Than Sex is far more light-hearted of the two movies, a trait typical of most Australian comedies and light drama. For one thing, John and Cinthia cite immediately recognizable, but minor, flaws in one another when they first consider the idea of asking the other to have sex with them (it’s done almost that blatantly), but they are remarkably compatible, even to the chagrin critics who argued that the film lacks enough conflict among characters to make it interesting. Both Better Than Sex and In Bed are, to an extent, centered around the pure mechanics of pleasure, but not entirely in an erotic sense. Better Than Sex is set almost entirely in Cin’s apartment. Meanwhile, Bruno and Danielle never abandon the small hotel room in In Bed. These characters exist in a temporary isolation, and in their private world, they carry on freely.

With the exception of minor conflict between Josh and Cin which actually results from the introduction of one of Cin’s flirty friends, there’s is a best-case scenario: two unimposing people who immediately click. And their temporarily private world doesn’t permit much to disturb their harmony. There’s even a cab driver who plays the contingent matchmaker when the characters shy away from each other or get hot-headed. Having spent several days together, the dogging question is what happens when nature photographer Josh moves to London as intended? (Obviously for these types of scenarios to occur, the characters can’t have a full-time day job). Spliced into the narrative is he-said/she-said styled commentary on everything from sex to relationships to observations about the opposite sex. The bold shots, generic clothing, and amusing passing commentary (director Jonathan Teplitzky’s experience was primarily in commercials and music videos) give it a vicarious, mid-90s date movie feel (it was actually released in 2000), adding to the non-confrontational approach. In the end, the movie is reduced to what might be described as mere open conversation about sex, and what comes before and after it.

Director Matias Bize’s In Bed is a little different, its setting more confining, its atmosphere a little darker. The film carries on with a certain bitter honesty and intensity, though equally with some exhaustion and repetition as well. Just as Josh intends to be in town only a few days longer after he meets Cinthia, Bruno will soon be leaving to get his PhD in Belgium while his companion, Daniella, is just days away from her wedding to man who had been abusive towards her in the past. When the grunts and the writhing periodically subside, they drift along in honest, intimate conversation and almost entirely without self-consciousness, carrying on in a way they may not with other people in their lives they share a close relationship with. This almost-entirely private isolation (their cell phones and wallet photos are the outside world’s sole intrusion) is conducive to that willful, unselfconscious exposure, once it’s out there. Revealing themselves once they realize the futility and absurdity of trying to fight it. Presumably out of obligation to protect this person whom he shares not only physical intimacy, but eventually, emotional intimacy as well, Bruno asks Daniella to consider leaving with him.

In Bed, which has been compared to Richard Linkater’s Before Sunrise quite often, is somewhat like a film installation piece, where the viewer serves as the first-person observer (in closer quarters than we typically think of ourselves as movie-goers entering the film’s world) to both the mundane and the exciting. Personal histories, expectations and general complexities are mixed with random anecdotes and passing commentary. The waning excitement and eroticism makes the situation feel so much more real – that people placed in a similar setting, confined to each other in a hotel room with little to separate them than maybe locking oneself in the bathroom, might get bored of the situation and tired of their mate. In which case, if the sex is a good enough distraction, then it is a situation that becomes purely erotic once again.

In Bed doesn’t rely on the fairytale resolution. Josh and Cin were singles with little obligation – she was a dressmaker with an apartment, and he seemed bound for a semi-nomadic lifestyle as a freelance photographer. While they feared the implications of the connections they form when their private world ceases existing, there was in reality, little to keep the two apart. Their happy ending in such an innocuous universe was almost a given. Bruno and Danielle, however, are bound by the realities of their public world, much as the happy ending seems possible at some point in the temporary, shared private world. “You were the break before the rest of my life. And I was the adventure before your trip,” Daniella poignantly concludes. The film avoids the need to resolve everything so neatly, and though the conversation may have been an intimate one, at least at times, between Bruno and Danielle, their imminent separation both provoked it and renders its importance fleeting. In the end, it was casual sex with somewhat interesting, but mostly distracting conversation. A release that was not purely physical.

But, to the vicarious viewer wanting to lose themselves in the affairs of Josh and Cin, and Bruno and Danielle, they certainly serve the purpose, depending on the degree of restraint into the fictional retreat he seeks.

The Never Ending Story – Terminator: Salvation

It’s a little heartbreaking when a wonderful, low-budget film is traded for big budget superficiality. When it becomes labeled…(gasp!)… a franchise and bottom-line intentions become clear: this is meant to be a profitable venture. Already starting the transformation with the second film, Judgment Day cost over $100 million to produce in 1991, making it one of the most expensive films of its day (and also one of the highest grossing).

While it’s been six years since the last Terminator film, Terminator Salvation, like The Sarah Connor Chronicles, breaches the lineage as part of a next generation franchise far more than T3: Rise of the Machines. Neither of the film’s originators, James Cameron and William Wisher, were involved. For Salvation, the shift to next gen mode means stylistic obligations such as international casting and plenty of pretty faces, standard battle sequences, and annoyingly referential dialogue. It is, like most every big-budget action movie these days, organized around flashiness. Another revivalist summer blockbuster was guilty of this: Star Trek.

As the first of the Terminator films to be set in the post-Holocaust world that Sarah Connor envisioned, most of the grainy, bleak film looks modeled upon military-themed video games. Immediately thrusting viewers into the action, the opening sequences are riddled with dust-filled clouds and off-screen shouting. As the seemingly hopeless war against the machines continues, Terminator Salvation takes place just before resistance fighter Kyle Reese meets John Connor. Unfortunately, in the chronology of time traveling tales, there’s always the potential for plot holes. The most egregious occurred as early as the first film. There, Kyle Reese of 2029 wants to “meet the Legend” and selflessly volunteers for the kamikaze mission to be transported to 1984 to save Sarah Connor from assassination by a terminator. In that time, Kyle Reese fathers John Connor, the fearless resistance leader who was, paradoxically, his mentor back in the future. Terminator: Salvation, set in 2018, shows the adult John Connor continuously listening to the tapes his mother recorded before he was born, relaying what she’d learned from Reese in the hopes that she can better prepare him, the future warrior. The mentor and the apprentice reversed roles in a way.

But, the life of the future warrior doesn’t seem like one to be desired. John Connor is constantly forced to be on guard against potential assaults not only against himself, but those intended to protect him. While Kyle Reese indirectly protects John Connor’s life, he must now return the favor, because doing so ensures that all prior events still occur, namely protecting Sarah Connor, which suggests that the past is always occurring. If so, then there is always a possibility of altering them, and consequently, anything in the time line that follows. Eventually, the Hunter-Killers flying into the frame will have a “Same Shit Different Day” slapped to the back of it. (Did someone say Wayan’s brother genre parody?!).

Though, we’ve come this far with the Terminator, it seems that in fifteen years, four films, and a television series, Skynet is the ever-relentless foe. (And I distinctly remember even personally assisting in the mission to bring down the machines and save man kind). In both keeping with the concerns for big budget action film aesthetics and the “next-gen” mode for continuing the story, earlier villains were perverted, this being the film that revealed the origins of the Terminator revealed in the 1984 film: a mechanized skeleton hidden by flesh ala Blade Runner (even waxing philosophical in an almost identical finale). The design that eventually became the Terminator shown in the first film is introduced more discreetly here, although his physique is far more exaggerated.

In every iteration, Skynet seems to develop something more powerful than the last (how do so many remain unscathed in the Salvation battles?!). The T-1000 of Judgment Day seemed impossible to defeat, were it not for that one little chemical weakness. But in the end, not Kyle Reese’s pivotal transportation to the past, nor the infiltration of Cyberdyne Systems in the second film (disregard the pointlessness of the third film) had done much to alter Doomsday or even quell the wrath of the Machines during its aftermath. Perhaps, that’s to be expected when movies become big budget franchises – they need that lingering variable to justify sequels. Look at the Halloween series. Not even getting beheaded and set on fire stopped Michael Meyers from returning to bother his victims. The same is likely true of the Machines. Now, as a next generation action movie (though not a next generation breach in the narrative since it offers nothing new), John Connor and Kyle Reese’s future appears to be saddled with dull consistency, especially when the writers take such small leaps in the chronology.

Welsh actor Christian Bale, Hollywood’s Glory Boy, took the reigns as this year’s John Connor, having worked with director McG in the Dark Knight. Although viral exposure of being a real prick on the set may have generated early publicity for the movie, it was a far more compelling alternative to his routinely grizzly-voiced character. Perhaps its the limitations of the story, but Bale’s “hero” feels very obligatory and all other secondary characters, with the exception of Anton Yelchin who apparently received high accolades for a rather lively performance as the young and cocky Kyle Reese, are intentionally restrained. Sam Worthington’s character, Marcus Wright, is derivative to the point of trying to mimick Rutger Hauer’s role in Blade Runner. Bryce Dallas Howard has a small role as Connor’s non-existent pregnant wife. Common as the fellow soldier not conflicted by moral questions. And B-movie regular Michael Ironside is largely ineffectual as the resistance fighter working with John Connor to infiltrate Skynet.

Salvation didn’t seem to generate many positive reviews, whether by film critics or film viewers, and part of that might be out of expectations borne out of loyalties to the earlier films (I’ll include myself among this group). Given the unusual Thursday release, Terminator: Salvation was almost immediately knocked from the Number One box office spot by Night at the Museum II. Now that we have followed the characters this far into the future, what we have glimpsed of the whereabouts of John Connor and Kyle Reese doesn’t feel very significant in the end.