1. Laurel Canyon (2002)
In most American stories, sex (or at least the romantic hookup that implies sex to come) is the culmination and goal of the story, not the beginning. So opening sex scenes tend to either say something specific about the participants’ compatibility (usually “Look at this happy couple! It’s all downhill from here!”), or their lack thereof. A perfect example: Lisa Cholodenko’s drama Laurel Canyon, which begins with Christian Bale going down on fiancée Kate Beckinsale, then stopping to seek approval, and frustrating her in the process. Then a call from his mom interrupts them, and Beckinsale finishes up while Bale is distracted. He selflessly (and none too convincingly) insists he’s fine without his own orgasm, and Beckinsale more or less shrugs and starts a casual conversation about scheduling. Every issue that will attack their relationship in the rest of the film is right there in that two-minute microcosm of neediness, selfishness, self-denial, and miscommunication, right down to the way his mom is about to unintentionally get in the way of their future.
2. Away We Go (2009)
It’s perfectly logical that a movie about pregnancy—and the accompanying anxiety over parenting philosophies and preparedness—would start with a sex act. But the indie drama/comedy Away We Go puts a slightly new (and more than slightly excruciating) twist on the trope: The sex sets the plot in motion by revealing rather than generating the pregnancy. The film begins with shaggy hipster John Krasinski going down on his less-than-willing wife, Maya Rudolph; she tells him to stop because she’d rather kiss him, and when he persists, she gives him advice that almost turns into a fight. Then he stops and slowly lifts his head under the covers—which eerily evokes Michael Myers under the bedsheet in the original Halloween—and says “You taste different. Did you know that?” The conversation just gets more uncomfortable from there. It’s a strange, sour, thoroughly unsexy beginning to what aspires to be a wry comedy about a loving couple making some significant decisions.
3 Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
When Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead opens with Philip Seymour Hoffman staring at his pale, pillowy naked body in the mirror as he humps girlfriend Marisa Tomei from behind, director Sidney Lumet seems to be going for shock—the moment is graphic, intense, and uncompromising. But it’s also another “It’s all downhill from here” moment, as it’s just about Hoffman’s only happy moment in the film. From there on, it’s discovery of embezzlement, an ill-advised robbery, the tragic death of a relative, betrayal, violence, a lot of increasingly terrible decisions, and a whole lot of angst. Maybe Lumet launched the film with a sex scene because there was no possible higher note to hit before the massive plummet into well-earned misery.
4. Betty Blue (1986)
Director Jean-Jacques Beineix sets up the whole of his third feature, Betty Blue, with its first shot. In fact, the film’s opening makes the rest of Betty Blue look like a postscript. Two lovers (Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hugues Anglade) make love beneath a print of the Mona Lisa. The impossible beauty of great art looks on impassively as the couple engages in the sweaty, athletic coupling of real-world desire. It appears intense, and intensely satisfying, but the passion comes at a price, as Anglade will spend the rest of the film discovering, when his lover goes mad and destroys herself and the peripatetic life they create. The sex scene seems to go on forever, particularly in the director’s cut, but the purple voiceover sums up their mad love better than any subsequent scene: “We made love every night. The forecast was for storms.”
5. Antichrist (2009)
Stunningly rendered in black and white, the opening scene (labeled “Prologue”) of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist barely waits 60 seconds before showing Willem Dafoe’s penis slow-motion driving into Charlotte Gainsbourg’s vagina (or those of their body-double stand-ins, at least). With the faint-of-heart already substantially appalled, the scene continues through the climax while simultaneously tracking the couple’s untended infant son falling to his death. Though beautifully shot and scored with an aria from Handel’s opera Rinaldo, it’s a thoroughly gut-wrenching scene nonetheless, particularly for parents who still like to get down. But those who find the prologue too grueling might as well stop before von Trier and cast break out the scissors and blunt objects.
6. The Wayward Cloud (2005)
Known for such deadpan, languorous portraits of urban alienation as Vive L’Amour and What Time Is It There?, Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang is about as austere as filmmakers come. So it was no surprise when he opened 2005’s The Wayward Cloud with a brief establishing shot of some ominously empty underground structure—business as usual, really. Then a woman dressed as a nurse walks into frame, carrying a watermelon. She lies on a bed, naked from the waist down, with half the watermelon positioned between her legs. What follows is one of the most inexplicably outré “sex scenes” of all time, as Tsai’s usual lead actor, Lee Kang-sheng, proceeds to lick, finger, and otherwise molest the woman via the watermelon, as if she actually had a giant fruit for genitalia. (Even when he finally screws her, he’s wearing the watermelon rind as a hat.) It’s eventually revealed that Taiwan is in the midst of a crippling drought, and that watermelons have become a cheap, life-sustaining source of hydration, but that still doesn’t exactly explain the hilarious incongruity of this sequence, which serves as fair warning for jaw-dropping (and much uglier) sexual moments later in the movie, as well as a reminder that food and sex is a combination requiring many, many towels.