Serious Sex: A Re-viewing of the Films Lila Says and My Summer of Love

Abstract:This article is a re-viewing of the early twenty-first-century films Lila Says and My Summer of Love from the point of view of their treatment of sex and sexuality, in contrast with the depiction of those subjects in past movies. The author observes that sex can be used in motion pictures—of which Doueiri’s and Pawlikowski’s are examples—in a way that is not exploitative. However obvious this may seem, it is most often not the case, and for reasons that can easily be adduced. Lila Says and My Summer of Love thus remind us, the author argues, of the possibilities inherent in a film art shorn of the gratuitousness of violent or pornographic sex—an art, that is, that knows how to use sex to achieve what it wants, or how to deploy “serious” sex toward significant thematic ends.