The scene from 'Frida' that made Salma Hayek cry and other sex sequences in which the actresses suffered real humiliations
The confessions of the Mexican actress about the sex scene that she was forced to make in the film 'Frida' are nothing more than the echo of other complaints that actresses such as María Schneider, Bjork, Renate Langer, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa have made for decades Seydoux on how they felt violated during the filming of erotic scenes.
In 2002, the film "Frida" was released in theaters around the world. Ten days after its premiere, Mexican newspapers reported that it was sweeping the box office. Hollywood critics, for their part, seemed very pleased with actress Salma Hayek's portrayal of the iconic painter and were especially concerned about the sex scenes she had played with another woman.
At the time, those explicit images in which the naked Mexican woman is seen suggestively waiting for a stocky brunette who invites to bed - a scene that portrayed the multiple female lovers that the painter had had in real life - drew attention media, but they were soon recast in the countless record of Hollywood sex scenes.
However, 15 years later, this past Wednesday, December 13, Google searches for the movie 'Frida' and that particular scene soared.
The actress after years of silence had come out to tell the world in a column in the New York Times how she had burst into tears before starting to shoot that scene. "For the first and last time in my career I had a panic attack ... It was clear to me that (Harvey Weinstein) would never let me finish this movie without him having his fantasy one way or another."
Salma Hayek revealed to the world that she had had to make a sex scene that was not in the initial script and that she considered unnecessary, just to please the sexual voracity of Harvey Weinstein who, given her systematic refusals to have sex with him, had forced her to undressing in the movie.
Her forceful scream, which soon spread throughout the media, seemed however to be nothing more than the echo of the voices of other actresses who at the time made the world see that those sex scenes that had so naturally been consumed in the cinema and that they had even made them win awards were, in reality, the fruit of non-explicit agreements, manipulations, transgressed limits, non-given consents.
Although the avalanche of denunciations against Harvey Weinstein makes him seem today the greatest of Hollywood's monsters, there are actresses who for years have been pointing out their own monsters. Maria Schneider, the protagonist of ‘Last Tango in Paris’, did it at the time, who unfortunately was not lucky enough to be at the right time when her demands became more relevant and resonated more within the industry.
If the audience outraged by Hayek's revelations is eager to see the controversial lesbian sex scene for the actress, let her follow her impulse and revisit the harsh images of the film by director Bernardo Bertolucci in which Marlon Brandon with the approval of the direct and Without first consulting the actress María Schneider, he uses butter, an element that was not included in the script, to interpret that he sodomizes her.
“The scene was not in the original script… I must have had my agent or a lawyer on set because they cannot force someone to do something that is not in the script, but at the time I did not know that. I felt humiliated, to be honest, I felt a bit violated by both, by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon did not console me or apologize, "the French actress told the Daily Mail in 2007.
In 2013, two young and brilliant French actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydouxque, had starred in "The Life of Adele", a film that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, also came out to denounce its director. Yes, perhaps they had given the history of cinema one of the most disruptive and real sex scenes in its history, but they seemed to be convinced that the price had been too high. Within weeks of receiving the award, they came out publicly to promise that they would never work with director Abdellatif Kechiche again. "I felt like a prostitute," said one. "It was horrible," emphasized the other.
Singer Bjork also raised her voice against director Lars Von Trier after working with him on the film 'Dancing in the dark' and in October of this year, 17 years after the film was released, she came out publicly accusing him of harassment. She also did it at the time the German actress Renate Langer on Roman Polansky.
Salma Hayek with her heartbreaking column, which recalls, empowers and multiplies the claims of so many others, makes it necessary to ask ourselves how many more sex scenes have we witnessed in the cinema without knowing the humiliations that actresses have had to go through to perform them? ? How many sex scenes would it have been better never to have seen so as not to have been silent witnesses to the abuses that were committed to obtain them? How many more is the audience willing to see?
