The Myth of Edgy: Why Real Sex on Camera Is a Step Backwards

The Myth of Edgy: Why Real Sex on Camera Is Not Even Sexy

By Paolina Weber

 

As an emerging female director, when I saw IndieWire’s recent article listing films that featured real sex, I felt a major ick—like a step backward into old-school male gaze:

 

Murky boundaries. Haphazard requests. Silence.

 

I remember one moment in film school when I was asked to go topless for a student scene. There was no intimacy coordinator, no conversation. I didn’t want to be difficult. But inside, I felt erased—like I’d been moved from collaborator to object in an instant.

 

Then—the camera department spoke up. “I don’t feel comfortable.” And suddenly—I was back.

 

Intimacy coordinators exist to eliminate those quiet collapses. And that includes the crew, too. Because even behind a closed set, everyone witnessing intimacy has a right to feel safe. Everything is agreed upon. Non-sexual touch is rehearsed. Consent is built in—and ongoing. You can pull the plug at any time. So what is the result of all this safety?

 

Art.

Not abuse captured on film.

So when we suggest that it’s cooler or more “real” to cross boundaries in the name of edginess, we're missing the point of creating desire filmically. Like honestly, it’s not even that sexy.

 

I didn’t always know how to name it, but Magic Mike XXL helped me understand the female gaze—so much that I wanted to lick the screen. Black bodies, big bodies, all races and types—the camera wasn’t looking, it was with us, as we felt it. It was electric.

 

The female gaze isn’t about performance—it  doesn’t even require a female director. It doesn’t objectify. It welcomes everybody, every gender, and the goal is truth. How?

1. It shows feeling from the inside.

2. With a deep questioning eye of the character.

3. And a connection to a viewer that’s open-ended.

Timothée Chalamet’s performance in Call Me by Your Name is an example of the female gaze at work—because of how it lingers in Elio's waiting, never reducing him to a body to be consumed.

 

So female gaze is about feeling—and sometimes that even means NOT being aroused.

That’s why I made the short I’m releasing this winter,Red Cherry Snow, about a young woman losing her virginity—to show the moment ‘objectification’ fails. How is she supposed to feel? Realizing her body has been built up as a receptacle for male pleasure. And now you’re stuck. So what do you do? My character decides to go numb. That’s why the scene after the sex scene is her in a cherry blossom orchard, with the petals raining like tears. From now on, I’m gonna be armored.

 

So in terms of actual sex scenes in movies, the people coming up—like me—are not interested in the old myths about pushing past people’s limits. We’re interested in telling the truth.

 

My first feature, Naked Rouge, which has queer sex in Act One—super hot—under the moonlight at the Colosseum. But it starts as a game of tag. So we, the viewer, are pulled in—and when it actually happens, and waves of desire melt the protagonist—we feel it too,

 

So “rawness” of actual sex is not even cool.

 

Sex scenes aren’t about showing a performance—they are about asking questions: what is sexy, and to whom?

 

To capture this experience, actors need to be acting, not crossing into a personal-private space. Our job as directors is to put a character in a situation that they discover themselves, genuinely—which artists can only do when they are in safe environments

 

About the Author
Paolina Weber is an emerging director whose work explores intimacy, identity, and the boundaries of power. She recently won Best Experimental Film at the Seoul Short Film Festival, was awarded Best Director at the Citrus Circuit Film Festival, and was a semi-finalist at Cannes Indie Shorts. She is currently preparing to release a new short film about losing her virginity and is in development on her debut feature—a bold, queer reimagining of the painter Caravaggio and his trans best friend

Time, Memory, and Cinema: Tarkovsky Through Lynne Ramsay’s Gasman

Image: A still from Gasman (1997) by Lynne Ramsay, featuring the pivotal moment where the father lifts his daughter atop the hill's horizon--- love suspended at the edge of memory..​

Time, Memory, and Cinema: 

Tarkovsky Through Lynne Ramsay’s Gasman

Tarkovsky argues that cinema is based on observation. It is a poetic distillation of reality, like a hieroglyphic. He writes: “The point [of cinema] is to pick out and join together the bits of sequential facts, knowing, seeing and hearing precisely what lies beneath them and what kind of chain holds them together” (*Sculpting in Time*, p. 65).

This is especially significant to me when thinking about Lynne Ramsay, who creates highly complex visual images—cinematic poetry not driven by plot, but by propulsion through images and sound. In her framing, she often leaves out details: she cuts faces in half, obscures full views, and in doing so, allows true observation. The camera never instructs us on how to feel about her characters. It simply *watches*.

In her 1997 short *Gasman*, the opening sequence is made of wide close-up shots and skewed angles. The power of the sequence lies in what Ramsay does not allow us to see. A little boy sprinkles sugar on a toy car to imagine snow, then sends the car speeding through it, crashing. We don’t see his face. A girl struggles to put on her shoes, saying, "there’s no place like home," dancing around. She lifts her arms to slip into a party dress. Only then do we see her face. Slowly, we piece together that they’re getting ready for a party. The brother doesn’t want to go.

These moments are, in Tarkovsky’s words, visual hieroglyphics.

Tarkovsky also writes that time is a subjective and spiritual category. “The time we have lived settles in our soul as an experience placed within time” (p. 58). And further: “Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul” (p. 57). For Tarkovsky, time gives rise to moral searching. Memory becomes not just a record, but a fragile vessel for meaning.

This poetic treatment of time and memory is central to Ramsay’s work. Her images feel like fragments from a deep, interior archive. Her moments are highly liminal: the order of things suspended. We cross a threshold with her. She invites us to make our own kinetic connections to memory and trauma.

In *Gasman*, Ramsay flags important memories by contrasting flat, compressed shots with scenes of profound depth. After the interior, domestic shots, the film opens up into a long exterior shot with incredible depth of field: the family walking up a hill to the party. The parallel lines of sidewalk, grass, and street all converge at a distant horizon. There’s a street lamp at the hill's apex. The daughter runs diagonally across the frame. The father picks her up and spins her around, silhouetted at the top of the hill—a moment of pure connection. It pierces us. In that moment, love triumphs over context.

But the next sequence delivers a quiet devastation. We arrive at the train tracks. Again: parallel lines. But this time, they lead not to joy, but to revelation. The little girl sees her father’s *other* family. The betrayal is not spoken aloud. It is felt, seen. And it stays.

Tarkovsky believed that the past only exists in the present. The present itself goes unnoticed until it is remembered. Meaning is not in the moment, but in its recollection. Pain, meaning, and art live in that remembrance.

*Gasman* lets us experience a child’s trauma exactly in that Tarkovskian way: through observation, fragmentation, and time. It creates, as Tarkovsky might say, the flame of recognition and heartache.

—Paolina Weber  

Originally written Nov 18, 2019 | Revised for publication

Image Source: IMDb Media Gallery for Gasman​IMDb+1IMDb+1