Sex and desire in British films of the 2000s by Nigel Mather

Author:Nigel Mather
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

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‘The way we live now’: Narratives exploring relationships in modern British society

This chapter will explore the ways in which a significant number of directors and writers working in the British film industry during the 2000s sought to examine and investigate the social and personal relationships, sexual yearnings and hopes and desires of a range of characters in a series of contemporary settings and situations. British cinema has developed a reputation for providing thoughtful dramatisations that concern what Thomas Carlyle once formulated as the question of the ‘Condition of England’.1 Chapters in Raymond Durgnat’s A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, entitled ‘The State of the Nation’, ‘Points of View’ and ‘Our Glorious Heritage’,2 reflect such ways of identifying and interpreting trends and tendencies in British film history. Such a focus on particular movements and subgenres can be helpful in locating important changes in how film-makers have sought to depict sexual, emotional and romantic relationships within British culture during particular periods of British social history. In his monograph The Day Britain Died (2000), Andrew Marr goes so far as to argue that ‘one could construct an entire history of twentieth-century British consciousness’ out of a study of significant film cycles in British film culture.3 Movements in British film-making highlighted as especially important and influential have included the emergence of the British ‘new wave’ social realist mode of film-making and the ‘social problem’ film in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the move towards examining British society and sexuality in a ‘Swinging London’ setting from the mid-1960s onwards; the ‘sex comedies’ and ‘sexploitation’ films of 1970s British cinema; the 1980s comedy/dramas depicting personal relationships as experienced by British citizens under a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher between 1979 and 1990; and the Richard Curtis romantic comedies of the 1990s and 2000s, which presented a more generally benign and optimistic view of the possibilities for individuals and couples to find happiness in their personal relationships within British culture than perhaps was implied or evident in several of these earlier film movements and cycles.

Before proceeding to examine how film-makers explored and probed themes of sex, love and desire in British cinema during the 2000s, this opening part of the chapter will consider the significance and importance of a number of these earlier cinematic engagements with such themes and subject material. This will provide a historical context for what follows and an opportunity to see how modern-day writers and directors have sought to draw, build upon and go beyond (where possible) earlier treatments of emotional, sexual and loving relationships in British film-making.

Looking for something to watch at the cinema in the play A Taste of Honey (Shelagh Delaney, 1959), Helen finds nothing which appeals, only a horror film, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and The Ten Commandments, which she does feel, however, might be good for her daughter’s moral education.4 Neither of these films seems to speak directly to Helen’s experiences as a single mother living in an industrial northern city and struggling to make ends meet.

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