Nudity classic: Emmanuelle Seigner in Bitter Moon

A great nude performance by Emmanuelle is almost enough to make you forget that this 1992 Polanski film includes three of the most annoyingly mannered actors in history: Kristin Scott Thomas, Hugh Grant and Peter Coyote.

Hugh Grant may be totally punchable on screen, but his comments can be very entertaining. Here is what he said about working with Polanski:

“Well, you know he’s a nutter. A genius but bonkers. Coming from a cozy English tradition, and going to Paris. He doesn’t work in the morning at all. (Impersonates Polanski) ‘I hate the morning.’ So you come in at lunch time and go into make up. Instead of someone saying, ‘Do you want a cup of tea and a donut?’, they say, ‘Would you like a line of cocaine?’ And then his wife will be there in make-up, usually topless, (another imitation) ‘So you like these?’ Yeah, they’re great. Very bohemian. Bitter Moon had trouble finding a distributor until after Four Weddings but I like it. And there are other psychotics who like it.”

Below are the very breasts Hugh was extolling the virtues of, accompanyied by other body parts:


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My comments on the film follow the jump:


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Nobody can accuse Roman Polanski of being in a career rut.

If you looked only at his serious early successes, like Knife in the Water, and his recent movie The Pianist, you would conclude that he is some kind of morose, ultra-somber Northern European intellectual, like Strindberg. In fact, you would be quite wrong. In the 40 years between those two movies, he flitted about like a butterfly from mood to mood, and genre to genre. He made many horror movies, but they range from serious stylish ones like The Ninth Gate, to campy ones like Rosemary’s Baby, to out-and-out farces like The Fearless Vampire Killers. He also made a crappy pirate movie starring Walter Matthau, a beautiful and sensitive Thomas Hardy period piece, a daring version of MacBeth with a nude Francesca Annis sleepwalking scene, and one of the greatest film noirs ever (Chinatown).

This particular Polanski film, Bitter Moon, is a sexy trash movie, basically the kind of lurid lowbrow erotica you’d expect from Zalman King. In fact, you could probably watch this as a trilogy with Wild Orchid and Two Moon Junction, and never know you’d switched directors. (Add to the list 9 1/2 Weeks, which King wrote and produced, but did not direct.)

An English couple (Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas) is taking a cruise to exotic ports, seeking to add zest to their bored lives. Grant makes a pass at a sexy Frenchwoman (Emmanuelle Seigner) one night, is rebuffed, and is then warned away from the woman by her crippled husband. The husband says he is not protecting his wife, but is being solicitous of Grant. He claims his wife is a monster. The husband (Peter Coyote) claims that the Frenchwoman is responsible for his withered condition, and he then proceeds to explain how all that happened in a series of flashbacks. Grant listens to the stories because – well, what else is there to do to pass the time in the evenings on a long ocean voyage?

The flashbacks detail a sexually obsessive relationship between two people who created a world of their own, then didn’t know how to function when they became sexually bored with one another, experienced a painful break-up and an even more painful reunion.

Needless to say, with Hugh Grant playing a role in which he was basically cast as Hugh Grant, he pays no attention to the husband’s advice, and pursues the sexy woman, resulting in wild, lurid, over-the-top consequences for everyone, involving perverted sex, humiliation, sadistic manipulation by Coyote and Seigner, murder, suicide, serial vomiting, and other shipboard activities rarely mentioned on The Love Boat. (Except for that episode in which Doc violently buggered Gopher, which most of us are trying to forget.)

The story is “sex gratia sexis,” so forget about the plot. That isn’t the central allure of the film. Your reaction to the movie will depend on whether you’d like to see Mathilde Seigner in various stages of undress performing various sexual practices. There are some very sexy ones. Seigner plays a dancer, and one night she performs a dance while wearing only a transparent nightie. This scene includes a graphic gynecological shot of Seigner, who is director Polanski’s wife. In another scene, Seigner intentionally dribbles milk from her mouth onto her body, then gets Coyote to lick it all off. Seigner and Scott-Thomas even have an onboard lesbian tryst in which Scott-Thomas flashes her own body. It’s pretty steamy stuff, if you’re in the mood for an erotic entertainment.

I thought it was tawdry, and the three main characters were all detestable, but it is very sexy, in a very sleazy way, and I think that’s all it was supposed to be.

One thought on “Nudity classic: Emmanuelle Seigner in Bitter Moon

  1. After a long day on a business trip (business: the curse of business travel) I got back to my room planning to switch TV on, switch me off. I landed in the middle of this. It held my attention, I watched to the end. Later I wanted to see the whole thing, I went to Blockbuster. They had it, but the weird thing was, they had it filed under “comedies”. Oh well, unlike the airport newsstand in “Airplane”, they didn’t have a “whacking material” section.

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