Not remotely. We're talking erections, fellatio and some fairly non-explicit intercourse between the two male leads, and some extremely tame lesbian coupling between the female leads (the latter wouldn't have been a problem at all). Given the precedent, Arrow was entirely justified in expecting an uncut 18. (Ironically, at the same time they were expecting Baise-Moi to be cut, and it wasn't, so it's swings and roundabouts.)GaryC wrote:I haven't seen Score but is it any more exolicit than The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome?
But my argument is that Score isn't a "sex work" - it's primarily a comedy of manners (and was in fact based on a dialogue-driven stage play) that just happens to have a fairly graphic but one-off sexual interlude - one-off in order to make it easy to cut without damaging the rest of the film (Radley Metzger was nothing if not a canny operator, and fully aware that he was pushing the envelope at the time). In other words, the BBFC is being blatantly inconsistent even within its own guidelines.In that case, though, the BFI sent in all the films and extras as one submission, so you had the contextual justification for individual films which were undoubtedly intended as "sex works" when they were made.
I don't have a problem with the notion of a classification specifically denoting "sex works" and neither does Arrow - the problem arises when it comes to selling such works commercially. Because of the ridiculously archaic (at least 30-year-old) restriction that R18 titles can only be sold over the counter of licensed sex shops, it is effectively impossible to make money on them unless you're directly involved in the management of the sex shops in question - because otherwise they have you over a barrel, and are fully and gleefully aware of the fact. (For instance, offering you £1 per unit which they then sell at £30, take it or leave it - and of course you have to take it, since you have no alternative outlet).In my opinion the R18 needs to be revamped or done away with - or at the very least allowed to be sold by mail order - but that's something I've said before in this forum.
Literally all that would be required to transform the market would be lifting the restriction that such titles cannot be sold via mail order within the UK. Once that happens, you remove the sex-shop monopoly at a stroke, retain your original customer base and make scholarly projects along the lines of Distribpix's The Opening of Misty Beethoven and Barbara Broadcast commercially realistic. And all it takes is an almost insignificantly trivial change in the law to recognise the fact that in the era of YouPorn it makes no difference at all to the nation's morals but a great deal of difference to people who actually care enough about (s)exploitation cinema to recognise that some films deserve Criterion-style treatment even if Criterion themselves wouldn't touch them with the proverbial barge pole.
