From: http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/EdmontonSun/Entertainment/2004/11/04/699860.html%5B2

ENTERTAINMENT Thu, November 4, 2004

THE LOLITA COMPLEX

LOUIS B. HOBSON[4], CALGARY SUN [5]

European films quite often explore the sexuality of children and young teenagers. North American films rarely do unless it's in an American Pie-style sex farce.

Even when serious filmmakers tackle this sensitive subject matter, as is the case with Nicole Kidman's supernatural thriller Birth, it can cause quite a stir.

In Birth, Kidman plays a 37-year-old widow who believes a 10-year-old boy is the reincarnated spirit of her dead husband. Canadian actor Cameron Bright was 10 when he filmed Birth.

In Birth's most controversial scene, Bright, discovering Kidman in the bath, disrobes and joins her.

Kidman has made it clear in all her interviews that both she and Bright were wearing bathing suits for that scene.

That's not the point. Audiences are asked to believe they are naked.

The bathtub scene was booed at the Venice Film Festival and very few people took up the challenge of muddling through Birth's murky metaphysics and questionable morality when it opened last weekend.

The $20-million US movie has grossed a weak $2 million in its first five days of release.

This past summer in The Door in the Floor, Kim Basinger played an emotionally distraught woman who seduces a 15-year-old boy played by Jon Foster.

Foster was 18 when he filmed the explicit sex scenes with Basinger but, once again, audiences were asked to believe his character was 15.

John Irving, who wrote the novel upon which The Door in the Floor is based, says one of his inspirations was the 1971 wartime coming-of-age drama Summer of '42.

In that film Jennifer O'Neill, 23, played a war widow who tries to find solace in a shy, virginal 15-year-old boy.

Gary Grimes, who played her teen lover, was 15 when Summer of '42 was filmed.

Neither The Door in the Floor this year or Summer of '42 33 years ago whipped up the kind of controversy Birth did.

Chartered psychologist Janet MacKenzie says it's the age of the young person and not the sex that accounts for the lack of ire on the part of audiences.

"A 15-year-old whether male or female is a teenager and we all acknowledge that teens are pretty sexual, but a 10-year-old is a child and to act on any impulse toward a child is crossing a line," says MacKenzie.

Still she cautions that what may be acceptable in a film such as The Door in the Floor is not necessarily so in real life.

"The courts made it clear in the case of teacher Mary Kay Letourneau that seducing a seventh-grade male student will not be tolerated."

In his controversial 1955 novel Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov told the story of a middle-aged man who was smitten with a 12-year-old girl.

Stanley Kubrick was the first filmmaker to tackle Nabokov's novel in 1962.

When Sue Lyon made her film debut playing Lolita for Kubrick she was 15, so she wasn't allowed to attend Lolita's Los Angeles premier because the film carried a restricted rating.

When Adrian Lyne filmed his version of Lolita in 1996 he introduced 16-year-old Dominique Swain in the title role, opposite Jeremy Irons.

In her interviews Swain insisted she "never felt exploited in any way. Adrian was so kind and understanding and protective. He made it very clear this was just a film we were making and that it was based on a great classic, not some piece of trash."

Brooke Shields had just turned 13 when she filmed Louis Malle's controversial drama Pretty Baby in which she played the 12-year-old daughter of a New Orlean's prostitute (Susan Sarandon). The child's virginity becomes the quest of the wealthiest customers at the brothel.

Two years later Shields starred in The Blue Lagoon, the story of a boy and girl abandoned as children on an uninhabited island who explore their sexuality when they reach puberty.

"I had to have my hair glued to the front of my body to make certain I would never be exposed to the cameras," said Shields of her experience filming The Blue Lagoon.

"I also had a body double, who was 18, for several scenes."

In 1976's Taxi Driver, Jodie Foster played an underage prostitute. Like her character, Foster was 14 when she filmed Taxi Driver.

She has since defended the experience, explaining that "nothing is really taboo in literature or film if it is told with honesty, integrity, understanding and compassion for the characters.

"That describes my experience working with Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver."

Foster received her first Oscar nomination for playing this tragic young woman.

Directors insist they do not compromise the integrity of their young actors, especially when a scene requires simulated nudity or sexuality.

In the teen comedy Mean Girls, Lindsay Lohan and her friends are on a scavenger hunt which includes returning with a pair of boxer shorts belonging to the school jock.

Lohan, who was 17 when she filmed Mean Girls, has a scene in which she is hiding in a shower while Jonathan Bennett, 22, disrobes, abandons his boxers and leaves wearing a towel.

"I wasn't even on the set the day Jonathan took off his clothes.

"They filmed me in the shower stall one day and Jonathan taking off his clothes in the same set another day and spliced the footage together."

Tel that to all the young girls who saw Mean Girls and tittered at Lohan's expressions of surprise and excitement.

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