In 2023, Throuples Are Having a Moment In Cinema
Make it stand out
In a widely shared Blood Knife essay from two years ago, Raquel S. Benedict offers a useful meditation on the growing conservatism when it comes to cinematic sex scenes. “Everyone is beautiful. And yet, no one is horny,” she writes. “Even when they have sex, no one is horny. No one is attracted to anyone else. No one is hungry for anyone else.” Today, the essay feels an apt testament to the bygone days of 2021 filmmaking, then dominated by a monolith of action and Marvel films filled with glistening, hairless, perfectly taut bodies without so much as a glimmer of erotic impulse. Was the sex scene well and truly dead? Many critics, Benedict included, seemed to think so.
Since then, sex scene discourse has taken on an unruly life of its own. Earlier this year You actor Penn Badgley claimed that he no longer wished to do sex scenes out of respect for his marriage, igniting debate across the internet. Many appeared to adopt a puritanical stance, suggesting that sex scenes are frivolous and unnecessary. In light of the rampant criticism surrounding the gratuitous sex scenes in Sam Levinson’s The Idol - widely believed to be one of the worst shows ever made - and his explicit portrayal of teens in Euphoria, there’s certainly something to be said about what kind of screen intimacy is worth creating.
Elsewhere, those critical of Badgley’s comments make the case for more - and better - sex scenes. Venerating them as rebellious images of representation, transformation, and liberation, queer filmmakers especially have long argued for the necessity of queer love scenes on screen. While films like Shortbus and Brokeback Mountain - the latter, surprisingly tame but still hailed as radical for its time in 2005 - helped pave the way for today’s queer sex on screen, depictions of cunnilingus still remain a point of contention.
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If sexless, sanitised filmmaking was a hallmark of late 2000s/early 2020s cinema, then 2023 has thankfully broached a bold new frontier where the ménage à trois reigns supreme. Of course, throuples, polyamorists, free lovers and so on have long been integral to the arts - think of the Vita Sackville-West, Virginia and Leonard Woolf; Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, renowned for her romances with Leon Trotsky and Josephine Baker, to name but a few examples. But rarely has the taboo of the throuple been as prevalent in film as it has recently, originally scheduled to appear in three releases this year: Ira Sachs’ Passages, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, and Ruth Caudeli’s Petit Mal. While little is known of the now-delayed Challengers, the trailer heavily suggests that Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor’s characters are entangled in a throuple for at least some of the film.
Passages, first and foremost, articulates the messiness of desire. How the things we long for often go beyond the remit of societal acceptability; how willing we are to abandon ourselves to act on sexual impulse. Focusing on a love triangle between a German director Tomas (Franz Rogowski), his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw), and an elementary school teacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), the film skilfully defies traditional infidelity narratives by centring a heterosexual affair as the act of transgression here. The rawness of Passages’s sex scenes is bolstered by the enigmatic presence of Rogowski and Exarchopoulos, yet still wildly intimate because of Sach’s tender direction.
“If sexless, sanitised filmmaking was a hallmark of late 2000s/early 2020s cinema, then 2023 has thankfully broached a bold new frontier where the ménage à trois reigns supreme.”
In a review for Slate, Sam Adams writes that the trio’s performances possess “an almost biological specificity” to them and it’s hard to disagree. We first meet Tomas and Martin amidst the languishing of their sexual attraction for one another, only for Passages to later show how their desire is reignited in a lengthy sex scene. If the chemistry between Rogowski and Whishaw seems palpable, it’s likely because the actors took the helm and directed their own intimate scenes. It’s a far cry from the gruelling direction behind the sex scenes of Blue is the Warmest Colour where Exarchopoulos first rose to fame; affording the actors complete agency over their own bodies and with one another.
Petit Mal similarly observes the evolving dynamics of a lesbian throuple in Colombia when the dominant Laia (played by Caudeli) goes away on a business trip. Like Tomas, Laia is also a director - her role within the relationship commanded by a molecular attention to detail and her partners. But unlike Passages, the film differs wildly in her treatment of her partners, and Caudeli crafts a dynamic far more tender, honest, and domesticated than Tomas would ever be capable of.
To an outlier, it’s relatively easy for the significance of Petit Mal and Passages to go overlooked. Queer sex - even within the context of a throuple - hardly encroaches new filmmaking territory, but their presence in today’s cinematic landscape feels particularly poignant. Amid the rampant bans and censorship of queer literature across the United States, authentic portrayals of queer love and queer sex on screen grows ever more vital. On learning that the film had received a rare NC-17 rating, Sachs told The LA Times that “We hunger for movies that are in any proximity to our own experience, and to find a movie like this, which is then shut out, is, to me, depressing and reactionary.” He continues, “It’s really about a form of cultural censorship that is quite dangerous, particularly in a culture which is already battling, in such extreme ways, the possibility of LGBT imagery to exist.”
By impulse, it would be easy to dismiss the current wave of throuple-centric films as gauche and gimmicky. Perhaps in certain cases (looking at you, Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona) polycules feel more tantamount to the fantasy of male directors rather than anything truly progressive, but desire is rarely as neat or linear as cinema would often have us believe. In the case of Passages, the tri-fold relationship serves as a vital exploration of Tomas' tormented psyche, asking a series of more burgeoning questions about sexual identity in the process. Articulating these kinds of desires in such a way goes beyond sex for sex’s sake, typifying the polemical power of carefully crafted queer intimacy in film in a time where queer art faces constant threats of censorship.
Words: Katie Tobin