Can Sexual Provocation Still Sell?

The promise of boundary-pushing naughtiness doesn't get people to the theater the way it used to.

John Vanco, who released risqué fare like the South Korean film “Lies” and Catherine Breillat’s “Fat Girl” earlier this decade, agrees. Though he says button-pushing subject matter helps provide films with a hook for press and media outlets, he adds, “It only works when there’s something really strong at the core of the film and it’s a valuable, legitimate work of art.”

Breillat’s 1999 “Romance” was one of the recent decade’s more infamous and successful foreign movies to draw attention because of its quasi-pornographic content, eventually grossing over $1.3 million. But compare that hit to those early ’90s Miramax films “Sirens” and “The Cook, Thief,” which both grossed more than $7 million, and it’s easy to see how times have changed.

In the age of the internet, where scatological-fetish porn trailer “Hungry Bitches” (a.k.a. “2 Girls 1 Cup”) becomes a pop-culture phenomenon and any number of extreme behaviors can be witnessed with the click of a mouse, there may be less of a rush for intellectuals and art film aficionados to get their perverse fix at the theater. As Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman wrote in a highly negative review of “Antichrist,” “The impotent folly of ‘Antichrist’ is that von Trier has made it his mission to shock the bourgeoisie in an era when they can no longer be shocked.”

But if arthouse audiences are no longer susceptible to shock, that doesn’t mean they don’t want a little titillation at home.

On VOD, where “Antichrist” becomes available today, films of this sort are more likely to be embraced, according to Werner. He cites past examples like Jean-Claude Brisseau’s sexually graphic films “Exterminating Angels” and “À l’aventure.” “That film didn’t do any business theatrically,” says Werner, referring to the former, “but on VOD, almost a 100,000 people saw it.” Similarly, IFC’s VOD release of a Spanish film called “Diary of Nymphomaniac” also performed well on the home viewing platform, and Catherine Breillat’s “The Last Mistress” was among the company’s top on-demand titles in 2008.

Werner also points to the 2004 release of Vincent Gallo’s “The Brown Bunny,” which features an unsimulated blowjob between Gallo and Chloe Sevigny. The movie only made $366,000 in theaters, but because of the high profile it developed due to the controversy surrounding its marketing and sex, the company sold the video rights for over a million dollars to Sony, according to Werner, thereby making a tidy profit for all involved. Ultimately, Werner is confident that “Antichrist,” will have a similarly long life on VOD and DVD.

Strand’s Gerrans comparably points to a sexy Spanish film they released straight to video called “Don’t Look Down,” about a young man learning the sexual powers of the Kama Sutra. At first, it sold very little, but then it became one of the company’s best performing VOD titles. “It’s much easier for a person to watch sexual content in the comfort of their living room, rather than a public theater,” Gerrans says. “VOD is a simple solution to that.”

Of course, the world of indie film in general appears to be migrating to such new distribution platforms as video-on-demand and web streaming. But sexually provocative subject matter appears to be especially suited to these new “privacy of your own home” options.

As Mark Urman says, “If you sit on your couch in your family room, you can go to your movie menu and there’s an extraordinary array of sexually provocative content. The price is good, you don’t have to go into the back room of the Blockbuster, and everything is hygienic.”

[Additional photos: "Shortbus," THINKFilm, 2006; "The Brown Bunny," Wellspring Media, 2004]

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