Times Newspapers Limited
March 11, 2001
By Garth Pearce

Will Joseph Fiennes's erotic new film get past the censors, asks Garth Pearce

Joseph Fiennes recently spent seven solid days in bed with the Hollywood siren Heather Graham, simulating sex. Not just ordinary sex, either. We're talking passionate, kinky, athletic, no-holds-barred sex. The kind of sex that leaves nothing to the imagination. It's a tough job, acting.

Fiennes, of course, is no stranger to hopping out of his doublet and under the duvet. As the lead in Shakespeare in Love and the ardent lover Robert Dudley in Elizabeth, he is used to the mixture of embarrassment and intrigue that goes with the steamier side of his roles. But even he admits that his encounter with Graham, for the forthcoming British feature Killing Me Softly, was in a different league altogether. In this instance, the sex was, apparently, so strong and compelling that cinema audiences will be forgiven for forgetting that it is all just an act.

"It is very passionate and very physical," reports Fiennes, after his marathon session. "My character has had a cursed past with women. He falls in love with Graham's character, and their relationship is excessive to the point of becoming dangerous. She leaves her boyfriend, they marry quickly and the sex becomes darker and very adventurous. She then starts getting obscure letters, saying that he has killed previous girlfriends and also raped someone. So, is this complicated man a murderer and a rapist?"

We will have to wait for the film's release later this year to find out, but already there is much talk about the winning on-screen sexual chemistry between Fiennes and Graham, both 30, and about the explicit nature of their trysts. If nothing else, Killing Me Softly looks set to be another litmus test in how far censors -and mainstream audiences -will go.

Unlike others of that ilk, the sex scenes in the film are no sideshow to the main plot. They form one of the central themes of Nicci French's novel, from which the story is taken. Fiennes plays a top climber, Adam Tallis, to Graham's American career woman, Alice Loudon. When the pair meet, it is lust at first sight. Their hands stretch out to press the button at a pedestrian crossing and accidentally touch, eyes lock at the surge of sexuality that passes between them, and by the evening they are in bed together. In Loudon's description of the scene, "sex had never been like this. There had been indifferent sex, embarrassing sex, nasty sex, good sex, great sex. This was more like obliterating sex".

This episode, and subsequent ones of sadomasochism, capture the nature of sexual obsession at its most extreme. The challenge for the director, Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine), and the award-winning cinematographer Mick Coulter (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Sense and Sensibility) will be to deliver the right erotic mood without slipping into gratuitous soft porn.

Whatever the outcome, the actors involved are swift to insist that theirs was a strictly professional encounter. Fiennes has a regular girlfriend, and Graham is in a high-profile relationship with the 21-year-old Australian actor Heath Ledger (10 Things I Hate About You). "It does tackle sexuality fairly full on," concedes Fiennes. "And as Heather was hired before me, and I rate her highly, I knew what I was getting involved in from an acting point of view. Does it affect your own private life? You just can't let it. Sex scenes are hard work, though."

Graham, whose biggest box-office success so far is the comedy Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, is equally disarming, despite the fact that Killing Me Softly is her debut in a leading role. "Some people were telling me that perhaps I should not do such a darkly erotic film, but I have to accept that this stuff just interests me," she says. "I like to think I am comfortable with my own sexuality. It is a risk, but I have become braver with each film so far."

For the film's British producer, Lynda Myles, it is arguably her bravest movie too. "It is the notion of mad love that appealed to me," she says. "When eyes meet in the street or on an escalator, and you can feel a certain something - and most of us have had that feeling -what happens if you abandon the security of your life and give everything up for a stranger?" She also has no fears about the censor. "This will be erotic rather than gratuitous," she insists.

Whether this proves true or not will depend largely on individual opinion. What some viewers find acceptable, others will denounce as pure titillation. Either way, the film is bound to turn back memories to another erotically charged thriller, Nic Roeg's 1973 Don't Look Now, which is being rereleased this month. Even after several screenings on television, the film still retains its power to shock, not least for the convincing bedroom scene between its stars, Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Compared to the crude and gratuitous way that sex is used to sell so many films today, theirs is a masterclass in uninhibited, context-driven love-making.

So what is Heather Graham's verdict on the big screen's most erotic moment? "Last Tango in Paris," she recalls. "I had never seen anything so far out, with so much sex, and I found it arousing." Fiennes is a little more circumspect: "The scene between Jude Law and Rachel Weisz in my latest film, Enemy at the Gates, takes some beating," he says. "It is furtive and almost forbidden, and that makes it work." And for Fiennes, it's just part of the job. q Joseph Fiennes is now appearing as Edward II at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre; Enemy at the Gates opens on Friday. Heather Graham is in the comedy Say It Isn't So, which opens on May 4. Don't Look Now is rereleased on Mar 23