Roméo et Juliette: Oh My God Juliette is Naked!

This weekend, very late at night the modernised Québécois version of Roméo et Juliette comes on The Movie Network. I remember hearing something about this being a somewhat good movie so I figured I’d give it a shot and the quality of the movies coming out of Québec in the past few years have been more than impressive. It’s no longer about life on the farm in the 19th century anymore… what a relief.

So I start watching, more or less absent-mindedly; because it’s late and I’m tired and I’m expecting some fluffy lovey-dovey romance since its Romeo and Juliette. But Dave should have remembered who wrote the original play, silly man. I know this late in coming, but had I seen this on release, I would have blogged about it then. Maybe it’s lost a bit of relevance.

Now I’m not gonna review this movie, this is more about what I expected people to react to. First the movie is NOT a teen movie and isn’t soft and fluffy. It’s hardcore, bloody, violent, has plenty of sex and nudity and thus the whole point of this blog post.

You see the virginal Juliette is played by en equally virginal 14 year old actress named Charlotte Aubin. She’s beautiful in the angelic sense, but then you can’t find just any hotty to play Juliette. She has to be pretty in the sense that any teenaged boy would fall completely madly in love with her. Done.

Problem is, or more to the point is people will see a problem with young Charlotte appearing nude in the movie. Because oh my god you can’t show a fourteen year old girl nude in a movie can you? Well they did, full on nude, nothing full frontal. So there we have a naked fourteen year old in a mainstream movie. Go run, get the DVD and pause because it’s what you’ll have to do to see anything to peak your interest.

The film has 3 big scenes of Charlotte nudity. The first one has her seen from behind for a whole 1 second in the shower, where you can see her butt, oh my! The other, well it’s the ubiquitous love scene where the clumsy Romeo struggles to unclasp her bra and she has to do it for him and if you catch a nipple slip for less that one third of a second, wow, you lucky bastard and then after the lovemaking they go skinny dipping in the river or lake in which you see her in silhouette (you see Romeo also of course). OH GEE that’s so much nudity, we could start a website.

So why am I even talking about this? Because as I saw her naked bubble butt in the shower scene first thing that came to mind was… well ok, the second thing that came to mind was: Oh yeah I can see it now, people are gonna have a fit because a fourteen year old is naked in a movie. So after the movie was over I hit the internets and started Googling for intel. And like a bell to the ears of Pavlov’s Dog, I found a crapload of comments on how nudity is bad, but not much on the excessive violence. I thought us Québecois were liberated… I thought wrong.

People lost it over things like “how could she get naked for the first time in front a camera crew” (1) or “such a young girl should never have been shown nude” (2), that the sex scenes between the other characters were like BDSM (3) and my personal favorite, showing a 15 year old’s naked butt in a shower is child pornography (4). Oh Boy!

For people with internet connections, y’all should go and do some Googling on what BDSM really is and get on the BANGBUS to see what pornography really is. People are acting like poor Charlotte had a gun to her head and plus, the most “nudity” you see is her bare ass. Everything else is mostly implied. My point is you people need to get out more, teenagers like to get naked and have crazy monkey sex, big big shocker I’m sure. But I have another point.

Last year another movie was released in Québec where a 10 year old girl, again of angelic beauty, is viciously beaten with an axe handle, hit with a makeshift Morningstar on her legs and soles of her feet, seared for hours with a burning hot poker because she had to have the devil cast out of her by an evil step-mother. The scenes were brutally graphic and explicit – if the suicide attempt doesn’t break your heart, you are inhuman – and yet this movie was acclaimed as a masterpiece of cinema. Because Aurore is based on a true story, the brutal and graphic beatings this young girl receives are easily permitted.So it’s the same old story. You can perpetrate the most disgusting violence on women (and now girls) on the screen and that’s ok. When it’s done for artistic purposes it’s all cool. Ultra-violence, go ahead, knock yourselves out but please, please don’t show any nipple. When did we all of a sudden become so British?

I’m not saying lets get all the girls naked in movies because gratuitous nudity actually makes me hate a movie – nothing pisses me off more when a girl suddenly decides it’s time to take a shower for no apparent reason other than to follow a formula, I find prurience insulting to the viewer. I’m just saying that we should stop acting like a bunch of stuck-up prudes when we see some nudity.

And this isn’t new. Let’s go through a short list of actresses just off the top of my head, I could remember who were obviously under 18 when they filmed nude scenes.

• Tatum O’Neal was 16 in Circle of Two (1980). She appears fully nude.
• Melanie Griffin was 15 when she showed us her moves in Night Moves (1975). Though this film typecast to playing nothing but nymphets she claims. I blame her personality, she’s kinda dumb.
• Danielle Edmund, played the body of Newt in Aliens³ (1992) where she’s shown naked and handled by the character Ripley. She’s not even an adolescent.
• Lyne Champagne in Mon Oncle Antoine (1971) didn’t look very old and she was naked. And yet Mon Oncle Antoine was held as the best Canadian movie of all time for over 30 years.
• Wynona Ryder’s was naked from behind in Square Dance (1987), her first movie.
• Jessica Paré was barely 18 when she bared her luscious breasts in Stardom (2000). Ahhhhhhhhhhh! That’s all I got to say about that.
• Let’s not forget Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon (1980) where she’s naked or topless for the whole movie, even with nipple close-ups when she’s breast feeding her baby and more shockingly in Pretty Baby (1978), with full frontal nudity for most of the movie playing a virgin prostitute when she was only 12.
• Dakota Fanning, 12, is going to appear nude in her next movie Hounddog, in which she is raped. Yes everyone’s favourite make-you-cry-child-actress naked. How will you all be able to live with yourselves?

The problem here isn’t hyper-sexualisation of girls like we see in adverts and MTV or the objectification of women, this is about our fear of accepting that teenagers are out there getting naked and having some naked monkey fun. It’s time for people to take their collective heads out of the sand.

I was a teenager way before the age of the internet and hyper-sexualisation, when sex-ed was the only type of discussion on sex one could get from adults and the only porn we had access to was ultra-softcore and hard to come by compared to what is easily available today. And we we’re having naked monkey fun. So was the generation before mine. Let’s not be coy, please.

Teenagers these days have access to the sickest pornographic shit you can imagine before they even get to second base with a real girl, seeing Charlotte’s butt in Romeo and Juliette will not warp them. And Charlotte Aubin, at 14 has more real world experience than lets say a 14 year old Linda Blair who masturbated with a crucifix till she bled, stuffed a man’s face in her crotch, spoke the most disgusting vile language in a movie made almost 35 years ago. Times have changed since The Exorcist and we’re now freaking out about a little skin? Let’s keep a little perspective here.

Not to forget also that in other countries, like the forward thinking France, women go basically naked on the beach, this includes, 14 year old girls also and no one goes ape shit about that? Same thing in other European countries. Why all the batshitness over some boobies and a naked bum?

Y’all should take a look at teen romantic movies from Europe, like “Fucking Åmål”, a Swedish movie about a young girl who falls in love with another girl in the small dreary town of Åmål; makes “Romeo and Juliette” look like an ABC after-school special. And yet it’s a far greater movie than Romeo et Juliette, much more poignant and touching.

I’d go into all the big deal about photographers like Sally Mann or Jock Sturges, or the very explicit TV show Tell Me You Love Me from HBO, but I’ve rambled on long enough…