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Clement Virgo’s goal is to set a serious, sex-positive movie in Toronto in the summer. Straightforward as that may sound, he’s breaking a lot of taboos. As Vancouver film critic Katherine Monk observed in her 2001 book on Canadian cinema, Weird Sex And Snowshoes, sensations of heat tend to sit uneasily with ideas of North.
Local content at last year’s festival was all about incest, but it hasn’t always been that way – Canadian film has long been big on uncomfortable-making erotica, from necrophilia and fixation on evil gynecological devices to vices that actually have no name.
Here’s a top 10 list of films that have made us feel peculiar between the sheets
1 Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996) This weirdly clinical tale of sex and car crashes wins the Definitive Canadian Erotic Film Award, for the thing with the leg. James Spader’s comment shortly before his sex-cult leader rolls his car off a cloverleaf reflects our own reactions to this film: “This is strangely satisfying.”
2 Dead Ringers (1988) Twin gynecologists form a creepy love triangle with Genevieve Bujold.
3 Existenz (1999) A young Jude Law repeatedly symbolically penetrated by rubbery fleshy devices. Why wasn’t this a massive international hit?
4 Kissed (Lynne Stopkewich, 1996) An attractive young woman has sex with corpses. It’s beautiful and spiritual. It actually really is.
5 Cowards Bend the Knee (Guy Maddin, 2003) Guy betrays his girlfriend while they’re still in the abortion clinic. Which is also a hair salon. Then he gets a hand transplant. (It doesn’t have to be realistic to be disturbing.)
6, 7 Exotica (Atom Egoyan,1994) The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997) What do stripping, obsessive jealousy, adultery and incest have in common? They’re all coping mechanisms for people with horribly sad lives. Not perverse so much as tragic.
8 Love That Boy (Andrea Dorfman, 2003) A quirky romantic comedy about a neurotic 20-something woman who falls in love with a 14-year-old boy. Sweet and whimsical, even with the frisson of pedophilia.
9 Love, Sex and Eating the Bones (Sudz Sutherland, 2003) A quirky romantic comedy about a porn addict. Can you picture the Nora Ephron remake? Me neither
10 The Decline of the American Empire (Denys Arcand, 1986) The Quebec intelligentsia are all cheating on one another nobody seems very happy about it.
