The most quotable title ever is that of Catherine Breillat’s 2002 movie about the making of a film with some intense sex scenes, “Sex Is Comedy,” all the more so because it’s a self-undermining title: the movie is no comedy—not the parts about sex, and not the rest of it, which is also about sex. If comedy there be, it’s divine: the gods look down and laugh at our attempts to film sex. By contrast, the new film “Sex Tape” is a comedy: not gods but people are meant to laugh, and it does happen every now and then, but at the expense of the sex. This romantic comedy isn’t just non-sexy; it’s resolutely anti-sexy, and the conclusions that it draws undermine its own premise, in a way that is very much of the times.
The modern romantic comedy is stretched on the rack of a dichotomy, one that I wrote about here a few years ago: the possibility of a polar disconnect between love and desire, between a meeting of the minds and a connection of the bodies. The classic romance, whether comic or tragic, is built on desire igniting a conflict that has to be resolved for a relationship to grow; modern romance is based on the premise of emotional and intellectual compatibility, the effort to kindle the sparks of love from friendship. Which is to say that the mind-body problem is central to romance and the romantic comedy, and “Sex Tape” makes clear where its makers—the director, Jake Kasdan, and the writers, Kate Angelo, Nicholas Stoller, and Jason Segel (who also stars in the movie, with Cameron Diaz)—stand on the question.
A cartoonish introduction shows Jay (Segel) and Annie (Diaz) as college sweethearts whose relationship is marked by its hotness—sex in the library, sex in the park, sex in a car in broad daylight. Annie gets pregnant and the couple marry young. Cut to a decade or so later, when, as prosperous bourgeois Angelenos (he’s a music-industry executive, she’s a mommy blogger) and the parents of two young children, their erotic flame has nearly sputtered out. Certain practicalities get in the way of sex (children awakening at night or cuddling between them in bed), other practicalities get in the way of desire itself (the myriad demands on their attention prove distracting), and what seems comical is the very idea of these life partners, despite their apparent emotional intimacy and mutual devotion to their family, getting physically intimate at all.
The idea that two people who used to have sex all the time now find it almost ridiculous to kiss passionately, undress each other erotically, touch each other intimately—this metacomedy is the mainspring of the plot. On a night when the kids are staying with Annie’s parents, who live nearby, she and Jay decide to give it the old college try. When the initial efforts, attempted freestyle, go poorly, Annie gets a pair of inspirations: first, the couple should record (with Jay’s new iPad) their exertions; second, they need to do compulsory routines, and she picks a choreographic script, pulling off the bookshelf their long-unconsulted copy of “The Joy of Sex” and proposing that they try, on camera, every one of its illustrated positions.
That’s the long setup. What follows is: Annie’s ideas work. Their pornographic video selfie lasts three hours and brings erotic bliss—but the recording leaks out (a tangled tale of iPads given out and a synching app), and they launch into an antic skein of adventures to reclaim those iPads and then to deal personally with a porn-hosting Web site. For all its absurdity, it’s not a bad neo-screwball artifice. Having gotten sexy back (at least for a night), Jay and Annie undergo an ordeal that binds them more enduringly and more deeply than the sex romp itself. The structure of the plot—moving from erotic frolic to practical teamwork—reproduces the structure of the couple’s relationship (which moves from hot youth to responsible parenthood), but with an added edge of risk.
At least, risk to Jay. The script reflects Segel’s affinity for comic self-mortification. The effort to quash the leaked sex “tape” costs Jay some major accidents and graphic injuries, something close to a symbolic castration. In these filmmakers’ world, sex is a pretext, a premise; it’s a relationship-starter but not a relationship-maker. What sex mainly provides for the couple in question is shared memories. It’s the bedrock of the past and perhaps a promise of the future, but it’s hardly ever present.
The notion may be grim, but it’s not uninteresting. That’s why the flimsy working out of the idea and the plot is depressing. If sex is a memory and a dream, an eternal promise, it’s also largely mental, which means that the element of fantasy is dominant. The fetishes of intimacy, the titillation of clothing and grooming, the preferences and the longings, the world of textures and scents, of skin and of caresses, and even the habits of nicknames, would be the imaginative essence of “Sex Tape,” and they’re completely absent from it. Kasdan keeps the relationship flavorless and funkless. Jay has a porn habit, it turns out, but what kind of porn does he like to watch?
The closest thing in the movie to the idea of non-generic and non-vanilla sex is the discovery, in another character’s home, of “an eleven-inch, double-sided dildo.” This movie’s banal view of the arousal and fulfillment of desire reminds me of an old joke, about a scientist who, when asked to give a speech about sex, stands at the podium, says, “Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure,” and sits down. Pleasure, in “Sex Tape,” is a one-dimensional positive, so familiar and so common as to need no introduction.
But Kasdan doesn’t do any better with the details of the couple’s practical life. If Annie and Jay have a shared sensibility to go with their physical compatibility, what does it consist of? Annie’s a blogger—but the only post that the movie shares is one that has to do with the loss of the couple’s sexual heat, exactly the anomalous post that her employers take issue with. Jay’s in the music business; what does he listen to, which musicians are his passion? What do they have in common? The best moment in the movie is a shift in tone, in which Annie accuses Jay of taking refuge in his work, going out to hear shows three nights in a row and leaving her alone at home. It’s the only time that the movie hints at a specific background to the protagonists’ dreams and frustrations.
The problem with the movie is an all-too-common one—a failure of imagination. Kasdan is a storyteller; the script outlines a plot, and he takes pictures of the actors fulfilling the actions that the plot consists of. What he doesn’t do is to imagine the implications of that story so that it maps onto a world of inner experience. It’s not a matter of a lack of exposition or of illustration; good directors can fill out a world with a light and rapid touch, even with a shuddering word (the name “Steve” in “To Have and Have Not”) or a goofy one (the “Sixteenth Chapel” in “The Break-Up”).
Love at first sight isn’t solely attraction—it’s not a polar opposite to the stuff of friendship, but, rather, a shortcut to it. Instant affinity is an intuition of both body and soul, the perception of deep values and infinitesimal intimacies through a vast and largely unconscious range of instant perceptions. That’s the underlying subject of “Sex Tape”—a love that, like in a cartoon, pedals its feet high in the air and fills in the ground beneath it before it falls, and then, having filled the ground in, gets stuck and needs a new abyss to pedal over. It’s a structure that invites development—one that never arrives. For all its up-to-date sexual flamboyance, the movie’s framework is a classical one, and its emptiness is a classical one, too.
