Teen Long Sex Film

Teen Long Sex Film
Being a teenager is hard enough, but once the hormones start raging, all bets are off. These films will help you get through it (or remember it semi-fondly).
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Risky and risqué, indie films have always been a home for bold, honest, and controversial visions of teens’ sexuality . Eliza Hittman’s “ Beach Rats ,” opening this week after bowing at Sundance in January, is another notch in the belt of the sub-genre, a sensitive and often shocking look inside the coming-of-age of a young Brooklyn teen.
Like the best of these films, it’s not all about hormones; it builds on questions about identity and desire. But that’s there too, in sensitively crafted scenes that don’t skimp on reality. Punctuated by some bad choices and an unnerving final act, “Beach Rats” embraces the full spectrum of teen sexuality, even when it’s not exactly alluring.
Here are eight indie films that engage with the subject matter in appropriately intimate ways.
While “Beach Rats” isn’t an official sequel to Hittman’s previous film, “It Felt Like Love,” the filmmaker explores similar themes and structures and both, told from seemingly opposite vantage points. Set during another languorous Brooklyn summer, Hittman’s debut follows 14-year-old Lila (a fearless Gina Piersanti), awkwardly and constantly exposed to the sexual exploits of her older friend Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni), who goes through boyfriends and experiences with the kind of ease that Lila can scarcely imagine. Lila’s desire to be, well, desirable , finds her fixating on a local boy Sammy (Ronen Rubinstein) with a reputation, whom she doggedly pursues in hopes of striking up a relationship. Lila’s emotional immaturity constantly butts up against her deep physical desires, leading her into increasingly fraught situations she’s not equipped to handle. Like “Beach Rats,” Hittman slowly spoons out important revelations, but its the smallest details that hurt — and hit — the most.
Abdellatif Kechiche’s rigorously erotic three-hour romance initially spawned Cannes walkouts before picking up the Palme d’Or, split three ways between Kechiche and his stars Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, proof of the level of dedication all three of them poured into a wild (read: maybe even nightmarish) shoot. While “Blue” earned big buzz because of the obvious — its long-form sex scenes, alternately hot and totally exhausting — that only obscures the finer points that Kechiche and his ladies put on the ill-fated romance between Adele and Emma. Hormonally speaking, it’s essential that the film opens when Exarchopoulos’ Adele is still slogging through high school, all burning desires and deep boredom, the perfect time for her to meet and fall obsessively in love with the slightly older Emma. There’s no love quite like the first, and while Adele’s awakening isn’t just about sex, but also her sexuality, that her most formative of experiences comes at the hands of another woman is simply one facet of a highly relatable love story. Sure, audiences may still flock to the film for its unbridled sex sequences, but there’s no scene more telling than Adele, stuffing her sauce-stained face full of spaghetti, bursting with new desires that have to be redirected somewhere .
Awkward, horny teens eager for sexual satisfaction are hardly underrepresented in the entertainment world — hello, sex comedies — but films that center on teenage girls and their kinkiest desires are still outliers. Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s Norwegian festival favorite doesn’t shy away from showing off just how gross, weird, and yes, horny as hell girls can be, too, all filtered through the experience of indomitable Alma (Helene Bergsholm). When the film opens, Alma’s sexual awakening is already chugging right along, though it’s about as tragically amusing as it gets, punctuated by routine calls to a phone sex line and a mother who just doesn’t get it. Alma’s life gets both worse and better when a popular peer pokes her with his penis at a casual gathering (romance!), and she refuses to let him live it down, alternately turned out and a little freaked out. Her isolation grows (turns out, high school kids are awful), but her libido won’t be tamed — a strange mix that adds up to a risky, funny feature topped off by some big truths.
Dee Rees’ lauded feature debut (based on her short of the same name) is a revelatory look inside the fraught coming-of-age of Brooklyn teen Alike (Adepero Oduye), as she conceals her sexual desires — and, in many ways, her entire identity — as outside forces push her to be honest about what she wants. That’s a hard enough concept for even the most well-adjusted of teens to face, but for Alike, trapped by a restrictive family and pushed to conceal everything from her wardrobe to her taste in music, it feels nearly impossible. Rees peppers in moments of Alike embracing her true feelings, brief flashes of freedom that hint at who she could be if she didn’t need to hide, but they also live alongside nerve-wracking reveals that drive home just how trapped she is. For Alike, her sexual awakening comes hand and hand with her personal growth, and neither will be the same by the film’s moving conclusion. She is not running, she is choosing.
David Wnendt’s 2013 German drama goes there. And also there, there, and there, right around there, over there, and down there. If there’s an orifice for leading lady Carla Juri to probe in pursuit of pleasure (and maybe even some pain), she’s going to do it. Possibly also with a vegetable. The most out-there, oh-wow coming-of-age story of the century, a movie that makes the pie-loving of “American Pie” look embarrassingly infantile and “Blue Is the Warmest Color” seem suitable for family consumption, “Wetlands” is a riot of sounds and sights that run the gamut between dreamy and nightmarish. But for all its gross-out humor, “Wetlands” also packs an emotional punch, all of it hinging on Juri’s wild-eyed work as the wholly unique Helen, on the cusp of the rest of her life (and super-horny for it).
Marielle Heller’s 2015 Sundance hit “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” is not your average coming-of-age story. Based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel 2002 “The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures,” the film bravely and brazenly turns its taboo subject matter — the sexual awakening of a teenage girl — into a funny, smart, and honest story that entertains as much as it educates. Bel Powley stars as Minnie Goetze, a precocious 15-year-old muddling her way through the swinging scene of seventies-era San Francisco. Like many girls her age, Minnie is struggling to find her place in the world, a journey made all the more difficult by her seemingly unstoppable hormones. As Minnie taps into her burgeoning sexual desires, her life takes a turn — straight into the arms of Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard), her mother’s boyfriend. Heller deftly navigates questions of consent and issues of age, and Minnie makes it clear that she’s making her own decisions, even if they’re probably bad ones.
James Ponsoldt’s 2013 adaptation of the Tim Tharp novel of the same name (beautifully written for the screen by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber) has often been hailed for its sensitive depiction of addiction and its fresh spin on the classic teen romance, but it also takes on sexual awakening in a moving way. Inexperienced Aimee (Shailene Woodley) is seemingly no match for the confident Sutter (Miles Teller), but when the pair fall into a hazy relationship, she bravely embraces the possibility that they could have something real. Inevitably, that includes Aimee losing her virginity to Sutter, in an achingly real sequence that sees Woodley assuming control and guiding the pair into one of the most relatable and emotional love scenes in recent memory. That it also handily deals with issues of consent and doesn’t try to be salacious just for the hell of it makes it even better, and further illustrates the different ways in which both Aimee and Sutter are coming into themselves, with sexuality as just one face of that maturation.
Tucked inside Julia Ducournau’s midnight movie, a visceral, challenging, and often jaw-dropping genre feature about cannibalism, is a tasty treat of a coming-of-age tale. The film follows a young student (Garance Marillier) who discovers some uncomfortable truths about herself (and the world) when she heads off to vet school (kind of the perfect setting for a body horror film), most of them centered on her evolving relationship with meat. All kinds of meat . Initially restrained and severely buttoned up, Marillier’s Justine eventually takes a bite out of her burgeoning desires when a weirdo school tradition activates her hunger in a myriad of ways. Ostensibly a horror movie with bite, Justine’s journey from vegetarian to meat-lover also mirrors her descent into the desire for other kinds of flesh. A parable and a straightforward chiller in one bloody package.
Love all these films but wish mine made the list too -“Toe to Toe”, premiered at Sundance 2009, distributed by Strand.
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Trailer for Blue Valentine (2010) starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams
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Derek Cianfrance dared to portray sex with any sense of realism, both physically and emotionally, only to quickly get slapped with an NC-17 rating for showing Michelle Williams’ character, Cindy, on the receiving end of oral sex. “The sex felt real - it wasn't sexy or 'a sex scene', and that's why we got into trouble,” co-star Ryan Gosling remarked to The Observer at the time. “You shouldn't be penalised for doing a good job.” After successfully appealing against the MPAA’s decision, Blue Valentine reached cinemas as an R, thankfully allowing mainstream audiences to see how emotionally complex a matter sex can actually be, especially in a broken down marriage like the one shared by its lead characters.
Gina Prince-Bythewood has masterfully shown Hollywood how cinema can portray realistic sex without any loss of romanticism or intimacy. That’s especially true of her directorial debut, 2000’s Love & Basketball, in which Monica (Sanaa Lathan) loses her virginity to childhood sweetheart, Quincy (Omar Epps). The moment is wonderfully tender, aided by Maxwell’s cover of Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work”, while being one of the rare films that actually shows the use of a condom. “The only note that I ever got from the studio during the filmmaking process was that when I shot that scene, they looked at the dailies and they said, they didn’t think she was enjoying it enough,” Prince-Bythewood told The Huffington Post. “And my argument was, it’s the first time and despite what the male fantasy might be, it’s not that great.”
Alfonso Cuarón’s raucous classic inverts the American sex comedy: Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) are stereotypical, sex-obsessed young men distraught at the concept of their girlfriends leaving the country. Choosing to live as bachelors, they befriend an older woman (Maribel Verdú), who seduces both of them. Yet, the film drives them towards one, real truth: their own bisexuality, finally freed during the film’s famous threesome. Though Y Tu Mamá También's conclusion is tragic - Julio and Tenoch's reject their own truth, turn their backs on each other, and suppress their feelings - their threesome still marks a moment of genuine, harmonious sensuality.
God’s Own Country star Alec Secareanu admitted he was initially “very afraid” of the kinds of scenes he would be tasked with filming for the gay drama film. “But the way each character has sex tells a lot about them; the way that they develop their relationship,” he told Attitude. The first sexual encounter between Secareanu’s character Gheorghe and Johnny (Josh O’Connor) is quick, aggressive and with little intimacy. As Johnny slowly learns to open up to Gheroghe, their second encounter is far more romantic; intense in a different way to the first. Both actors later told of how they developed a close bond in real life after working together on-screen.
A film that finds its eroticism in small gestures - in the languid rest of a glove, in a glance, shared across a crowded room - when it comes to director Todd Haynes actually filming the first time Therese (Rooney Mara) and Carol (Cate Blanchett) have sex, their chemistry is already so palpable that the moment feels nothing short of explosive. “It's very much like shooting a musical number,” Haynes told E!News of the scene. “You start the music and basically you just go and the camera finds the moments and the beats. And we had some amazing material with these two women to work with.”
Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winner is one of the most tender depictions of yearning in modern cinema. Its protagonist Chiron (played by Ashton Sanders here, at other points by Alex R. Hibbert and Trevante Rhodes) experiences his first sexual encounter with fellow student Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) on a quiet, isolated beach. Their fumbling may pay testament to the awkwardness of a teenager’s first experiences, but Jenkins’ approach also gives the moment a profound grace, and an acknowledgement of how it will come to shape Chiron’s own view of himself. “It’s the first time I filmed a sex scene. It’s the first time these actors had performed a sex scene,” Jenkins told Entertainment Weekly of the scene. “It’s not gratuitous. It’s very delicate in keeping with most of the film, but it kept me up at night. I really wanted to get the feelings of that first sort of sexual expression, and I wanted to get it right… but then, when we got to shoot it, it rolled off like butter.”
Much like Blue Valentine, Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 classic swiftly faced controversy due to a sex scene so emotionally faithful (while also depicting a female character, Julie Christie’s Laura, receiving oral sex), that it caused clashes with censors. A grieving couple desperately holding onto the shreds of their marriage after the death of their child, Laura and John (Donald Sutherland)’s raw emotions and vulnerability in this moment are famously intercut with post-coital preparations to go to dinner - an attempt, in fact, to satiate censors. Christie herself admitted the film’s innovations made the scene difficult to film since, “There were no available examples, no role models ... I just went blank and Nic [Roeg] shouted instructions."
Sex is funny, sometimes hilarious. There’s no getting through this list without acknowledging that fact, and there’s no better film to summarise it than Team America: World Police and its infamous puppet intercourse, enthusiastically filing through every sexual position in the book. As puppet creator Stephen Chiodo noted to MovieWeb, it’s the scene’s bracing artifice that’s actually the key to its humour. As he explained, “The more realistic it became, the less funny it was. The more axes of movement, the more lifelike movement we gave the puppets during the sex scene, it just wasn’t funny. But when you had them stiff like dolls, kind of rutting, it just was funny.”
Trust David Lynch to create a highly-charged sex scene that inevitably only becomes part of the web created to deceive and befuddle us. Rita (Laura Harring) and Betty (Naomi Watts) may consummate their bubbling affections for each other in a sensuous, dreamlike manner - but who is Rita in this moment? Who is Betty? Is this encounter real or imagined? This moment of lush, Hollywood perfection only creates the set up for Mulholland Drive’s earth-shattering twist. Betty is now Diane, and her own sexual experience couldn’t be any more different: a tear-soaked, anguished masturbation scene that seems exemplary of her own broken soul.
One of the finest examples of the erotic thriller, director Adrian Lyne depicts the extramarital affair in its full urgency, its entire spectrum of conflicted emotions, as suburban housewife Connie (Diane Lane) becomes enraptured by a handsome young Frenchman (Olivier Martinez). Their initial encounter is at first tenuous, tender, before a hunger seems to consume Connie and her guilt is momentarily forgotten in the throes of extreme passion, only for them to creep slowly back on the train ride home. The memory of its erotic power, the searing regret; those feelings soon become feverishly intertwined.
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From Gina Prince-Bythewood's directorial debut Love & Basketball, to Todd Haynes' achingly romantic Carol
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From Gina Prince-Bythewood's directorial debut Love & Basketball, to Todd Haynes' achingly romantic Carol
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What makes the perfect sex scene? The pure eroticism? Its emotional undercurrents? The shift and flow of the camera? Of course, there’s no real answer.
Our concept of how sex should work on film speaks to so many variants: what personally gets us hot under the collar, whether we seek the fantastic or the realist, or how these scenes should tie in emotionally with the rest of th
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