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..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington



One of Hollywood’s more entertaining pastimes involves trying to guess just where the MPAA ratings board draws the line between R and NC-17 when it comes to movies with strong sexual content. Ultra-violent films aimed at mainstream audiences -- The Passion of The Christ, Kill Bill and Saving Private Ryan, come immediately to mind -- seemingly have had so little trouble avoiding the dreaded NC-17 rating that, one suspects, anything short of an actual snuff film would receive a pass. Sex, however, remains a dodgy issue with that anonymous Valley-based jury of our peers.

Although proceedings are kept relatively private, the board will suggest changes that can bring a NC-17 up to a R. The offending scenes most usually feature sexual activity that is considered either too long or too strenuous, genitalia that are too visible or too engorged, and hanky-panky that involves blunt instruments and the penetration of one orifice or another. Some directors are so acutely aware of the board’s peccadilloes, they intentionally leave in material that normally would be cut, if only to deflect attention from footage they desperately want to get past the judges.

Sony Pictures Classics’ Young Adam, which opens in limited release this Friday after doing the film-festival thing, has joined Fox Searchlight’s The Dreamers and Lions Gate’s Switchblade Romance (a.k.a. Haute Tension) as that rare bird: a studio product unafraid to take wing with a NC-17. David Mackenzie’s bleak period drama probably could have won its NC-17 for any number of encounters, but, according to the writer-director, the offending moment came during a darkish scene, in which a fully clothed Ewan McGregor “went down” on a fully clothed Tilda Swinton, beside a Scottish canal.

“I’m told that sort of thing happens here, in America, too,” Mackenzie said, during a visit to Los Angeles last weekend. “I was willing to edit that scene, and others, if Sony Classics asked me to do so, but no one did.”

McGregor reportedly was adamant that none of his nudity be excised from the film.

While studios have always been reluctant to release films by directors who linger on the “naughty bits” longer than some observers think necessary, their excuse has been somewhat legitimate. For years, landlords have told exhibitors they were contractually forbidden to show films rated NC-17. They also were led to believe that newspapers and other media outlets wouldn’t print or air ads for movies intended for adult eyes only. So, in effect, they were doing their end-users a favor.

The MPAA, which long ago dropped its original X icon in favor of the more precise NC-17, has consistently argued that the rating merely alerts parents and exhibitors to graphic content, and it’s not passing judgment on a film’s artistic value. Until recently, though, the major studios have taken it upon themselves to self-censor their products, often requiring directors and producers – the late Stanley Kubrick, among them – to cut their films to a R before they’re submitted to the board.

Whether any newspaper would have refused to run an ad for a NC-17 version of Eyes Wide Shut is open to conjecture. Some chains and multiplexes might not have been allowed to run or publicize such a product, but most NC-17 films – those not produced merely as sexploitation or slasher fodder – are targeted for art houses, not wide release. Certainly, a NC-17 wouldn’t have stopped newspaper editors from assigning stories about an unobstructed Eyes Wide Shut.

"Young Adam is a grown-up film for grown-ups,” Mackenzie stressed. “Having it rated NC-17 didn’t bother me. Based on the subject matter, it was already marginalized, so the rating probably wouldn’t have made any difference one way or the other.”

At last month’s ShoWest convention, NATO president John Fithian happily noted a loosening of the reins by Hollywood studios, and urged theater owners to treat NC-17 films as … well, grown-up films for grown-ups.

"Every rating in the system has a function, and the viability of the whole system depends on the appropriate use of every single rating," remarked Fithian, pointing to the recent release of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, as evidence that "the myths about why the NC-17 won't work are simply that — myths.”

First of all, he said in his opening address to the convention, “theater owners will play NC-17s, but on a case-by-case basis … good pictures that fit the audience in their marketplaces, they will use that rating. Secondly, there's the myth you can't get NC-17s advertised," which Fox Searchlight effectively debunked.

The Dreamers was the first film released by an MPAA signatory company with an NC-17 rating in six years.

It isn’t likely that sex-starved kiddies would want to sneak into Young Adam, even if it played at a neighborhood multiplex. While the sex is graphically portrayed, there isn’t much more nudity than can be found on Cinemax after midnight. Set mostly on a barge that navigates a shipping canal between post-war Glasgow and Edinburgh – and based on a novel by beat writer Alexander Trocchi -- Mackenzie’s film offers fewer laughs than most funerals. It is, however, a deeply involving and splendidly acted existential thriller.

McGregor’s Joe Taylor is a handsome young drifter, who finds works on a barge owned by Swinton’s Ella and piloted by her husband, Les (Peter Mullan). The husband’s drinking largely prevents him from performing to Ella’s satisfaction in bed, and, before long, she makes room for Joe. At about the same time as this water-borne canoodling was taking place, Joe became re-acquainted with an old girlfriend, Cathie (Emily Mortimer), who comes to a mysterious and quite untimely end. After coming to grips with his role in driving Cathie to her desperate state, Joe finally arrives at an emotional crossroads of his own.

Like On the Road and other works by American beat writers, Trocchi’s 1954 novel has resisted adaptation. The author’s been described as a world-class dope fiend (“no one could keep up with him,” observes Mackenzie), a poet, pimp, literary editor and a companion to such writers as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, Terry Southern, Leonard Cohen, Norman Mailer and, even, Timothy Leary. Young Adam has often been compared to Camus’ The Stranger.

“A lot of the film is about loneliness,” said Mackenzie. “We trace his decline through his many affairs. Cathie was his proto-beatnik lover, and there was this sex/death thing between Joe and Ella.”

Glasgow and, to a lesser degree, Edinburgh have been portrayed in several recent movies – Small Faces, Ratcatcher, Sweet Sixteen, Trainspotting – as horrifyingly desperate places in which to be young. Unemployment and heroin abuse apparently are rampant, and children roam the streets in lawless packs.

Clearly, it’s a far cry from the sunny Scotland depicted in Bill Forsythe’s delightful 1981 comedy, Gregory’s Girl.

Mackenzie, like Trocchi, spent time on barges, when he was growing up in there. He loved the atmosphere, seeing “something graceful” in otherwise gray and smoky industrial milieu. He was inspired to add a scene in which Joe saves Ella’s toddler son from drowning, by a similar incident in his own life, and he also admits having a soft spot for Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante.

“I named the barge Atlantic Eve,” he said. “To me, our movie’s like, L’Atalante meets Last Tango in Paris (which also references the Vigo classic). That barge culture is largely gone now.”

Mackenzie couldn’t be happier with the performances turned in by Swinton, McGregor, Mullan and Mortimer. Critics, too, have been universal in their praise for the acting and direction.

Not surprisingly, then, Mackenzie’s Los Angeles-based agent has seen interest in his client skyrocket in recent weeks. Instead of jumping into a project right away, though, the 37-year-old Corbridge native wants to return to Glasgow to spend time with his wife and newborn daughter.

He’ll be back.

- by Gary Dretzka

April 13, 2004


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