‘To be seen was more important than to see’ While some deride the dome as a ‘big colourful hat’, I think it makes a fitting crown for a building that fuses architectural styles (Renaissance, Baroque, neo-classical). Traditionalists deemed it a bizarre addition – neither formal nor symmetrical, nor of utility (it does not form part of the interior, and the roof had to be reinforced to support its weight). And if there’s one skill Hollywood could usefully relearn, it’s that.The dome was a controversial construction, and it continues to divide critics, according to tour guide, Samir Torres. Even so, the scenes’ mere presence signalled to the viewers they were at least being treated like adults. Artistic justification can be thin on the ground here too, of course: Games of Thrones, the tits and dragons show, rarely aimed for more than titillation, however weird and wild things got.
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It just knows to find them on television, where the promise of sexual novelty can help a series stand out from the swarm of content. Yet the audience for the ludicrous sex scene still exists.
Whether the catalogue of earlier scenes mentioned above work for you or not, important things are happening in each them – and wouldn’t be in less salacious circumstances.
The resulting absence of almost any sex in mainstream cinema – along with the numbing prevalence of pornography online – has trained audiences to view such sequences as obscene and/or superfluous.Įven in the vanishingly few successful erotic thrillers to have been released in the last half-decade or so, such as the Fifty Shades trilogy and Netflix’s 365 Days, the sex is invariably an interruption to the plot, rather than a mechanism within it. Rather, the first coffin-nail was hammered in by the franchise gold rush of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when studios began fixating on expensive licensed produce, and couldn’t afford to exclude younger viewers. The zenith, as well you know, was the swimming pool clinch in 1995’s Showgirls, in which Elizabeth Berkley ravishes Kyle MacLachlan beneath a novelty dolphin-shaped water spout. But the heyday came in the 1980s and 90s, when Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger raided the fridge in 9½ Weeks, Nastassja Kinski got her panther’s paws on John Heard in Cat People, Sharon Stone gave away less than was assumed under police questioning in Basic Instinct, Michael Douglas and Glenn Close stopped the elevator in Fatal Attraction, Jamie Lee Curtis undertook a secret-mission striptease in True Lies, and Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore got clay between their fingers in Ghost. Scott has never been a regular practitioner of the form, but in 2013’s The Counsellor he delivered another rare contemporary example, involving Cameron Diaz and the windscreen of a Ferrari. House of Gucci makes a strong post-hoc case for the lost art of the ludicrous sex scene: those wonderful and now virtually nonexistent moments in cinema where hotness and daftness, weirdness or madness unforgettably collide. “I said, ‘I want you to f_ him like a man,’” Scott explained. “Because these two are fearless and formidable, I suddenly saw it’s funny,” he said, adding that Gaga asked him before filming commenced: “What do you want this to be?”
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Meanwhile, in an interview with CinemaBlend, Scott said he only realised the scene should be played for laughs when Gaga and Driver pushed their performances so far on set. (She was talking about the role in general, but in this scene, the preparations definitely show.) “I studied a house cat, a fox, and a panther. “I studied animals, actually, for this,” Gaga told ITV News. Puccini swells on the soundtrack, before being supplanted by George Michael’s Faith, while the pair’s own nonverbal romantic vocalisations suggest a jailbreak at the monkey sanctuary. One day, Patrizia teasingly lures Maurizio into the site office, and the pair make love on the desk – except “making love” doesn’t begin to capture the pneumatic frenzy that ensues. Patrizia’s father runs a successful haulage firm, where Maurizio finds work after he’s disowned by his horrified father (Jeremy Irons), who regards this ruby-lipped bombshell as a gold-digger trying her luck. The first chunk of Ridley Scott’s brash true-crime drama concerns the strategic seduction of Adam Driver’s Maurizio Gucci, a staid young fashion-house scion, by Lady Gaga’s Patrizia Reggiani, a thrusting young nouveau-riche socialite.
The House of Gucci press tour has been frolicsome all round, but the commentary around one scene in particular has been especially frisky.