Take one man and gently split him open. Remove one of his ribs, and create from it a woman, slightly smaller and soft in all the places he’s hard. She’ll be his wife and helpmeet. Let’s call her Eve and call him Adam. Together they’ll be humanity’s first parents, setting the pattern for proper love and marriage ever after.
Or so the biblical origin myth goes. Similarly, there’s Plato’s story about each soul being split in two, with every person incomplete until they find their matching half. It’s a sentiment that survives in most popular love songs, poems and films and certainly in almost all romantic comedies – a longing expressed beautifully in the Spanish phrase mi media naranja, which means “my half-orange”, to describe one’s sweetheart, one’s perfect other half.
But even in the Bible, it didn’t work out as planned. Eve broke the rules and ate the fruit. A third party – that wily serpent, a sexual creature, there’s no doubt about it – came between the lovers and tore apart their union, causing exile from Eden into the wilderness, where they’re punished by hard work and painful childbearing. They broke the rules set by God. Love got complicated.
It’s a myth that obsesses me, and one of the reasons I’ve called myself ‘Eve’ in my new book Fallen: A Memoir about Sex, Religion and Marrying Too Young (Affirm Press).
As an emotional risk-taker and sometime rule-breaker, I’ve always been attracted to cinema that reflects the complexity of love, desire and sexual attraction – the breaking of love taboos. It’s a relief to find films that explore this territory, sometimes condemning characters and their behaviour, but always trying to understand more deeply the fact that we are tricky beasts with hearts that follow their own strange and often dangerous logic.
The would be no cinema if every character fell in love with a suitable other, and stayed in monogamous bliss ever after. Bad matches, wrong longings and complicated threesomes, foursomes and moresomes are the stuff of great stories.
Here are seven of my favourite love taboo-breaking films:
Polyamory and Girl on Girl Love: Henry & June (1990)
Set in 1930s Paris and based on the book by real life sexual adventurer, bigamist and diarist Anaïs Nin, Henry & June traces the start of a three-way literary love affair between Nin (Maria de Medeiros), the knockabout Brooklyn-accented writer Henry Miller (Fred Ward) and his sultry, seductive wife, June (Uma Thurman). The ethereal Nin goes home at night to her adorable husband (Richard E. Grant) and writes of her exploits as he kisses her neck. Directed by Philip Kaufman and sumptuously shot so that even the Parisian cockroaches look glamorous, this is a film adored by polyamorists, non-monogamists and those many people wanting to see lush but ‘tasteful’ girl-on-girl sex scenes.
Source: Henry & June
Pedophilia & Indecent Lollypop Sucking: Lolita (1962)
It doesn’t get more taboo-breaking than this story of Humbert Humbert, a 37-year-old literature professor (James Mason) falling in love with a 12-year-old ‘nymphet’ (Sue Lyon) and marrying her mother so he can be close to her. Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous 1955 novel lacks the elegance, depth and sly, sick charm of the book, but it does successfully evoke the obsession for the barely pubescent girl with her cute bathing suits, lollypops and golden hair. The pedophile is doomed, of course.
Source: Lolita
Reincarnated Love, Woman for Kid!: Birth (2004)
This much-underrated film from director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) is powerful, mysterious, and distinctly unsettling. Nicole Kidman plays a rich New York widow who meets a 10-year-old boy (a marvelous Cameron Bright) who’s convinced he’s the reincarnation of her husband who died 10 years ago. Initially skeptical, she slowly comes to wonder if perhaps he is the love of her life returned – and what should she do with the fact he’s now in a child’s body?
Source: Birth
Adultery – With your Son’s Best Friend: I Am Love (2010)
I’ve written at length about why I adore this sumptuous, soulful Italian film, directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Tilda Swinton as a middle-aged Milan matron who falls in love with her son’s best friend. Swinton is luminous as a woman transformed by an almost wordless love for a much younger man. It’s a love that threatens to unravel a family empire, and yet it’s worth the tragedy that ensues.
Watch I Am Love now at SBS On Demand
Blog: Why You Should Watch I Am Love
Watch trailer/Read review
Blog: Why You Should Watch I Am Love
Watch trailer/Read review
Source: I Am Love
Gender-bending Time-Travelling Love: Orlando (1992)
The intriguingly androgynous Tilda Swinton features yet again in Sally Potter’s lavish, witty (though sometimes smug) adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s comic fantasy Orlando. It’s a tale of a time-travelling, gender-bending aristocrat whose love affairs encompass four centuries.
Watch Orlando now at SBS On Demand 
Source: Orlando
In Love with a Blow-up Sex Doll: Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Lars (Ryan Gosling) is a shy young man living in a small town. He brings home Bianca, a girl he met on the Internet and introduces her to his family. There’s one problem: Bianca is a life-size blow-up sex doll. Director Craig Gillespie and writer Nancy Oliver take what could have been a crass, one-joke comedy and turn it into a tender love story and a surprising drama around the reactions of Lars’ family and friends, beautifully played by Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider and Patricia Clarkson.
Incest, Patricide, Matricide and Cat-Killing: Bad Boy Bubby (1993)
Disgusting, absurd, compassionate and beautiful, Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby is rightly considered an Australian cult classic. It’s the tale of a 30-year-old man-child (Nicholas Hope) who’s been kept in an Adelaide basement his whole life by his psychotic ‘Mom’ (Claire Benito). When he finally escapes into the real world, Bubby finds it both wonderful and terrifying. The taboos broken in this film are multiple: cockroach-eating, cat-killing (with Cling-wrap, no less) and patricide. But the biggest taboo of all is the fact that Mom has sex with Bubby, and even after he’s all grown up and left the nest, Bubby’s always going to want a woman who reminds him of Mom. Some damage can never be undone.
Source: Bad Boy Bubby
Fallen: A Memoir about Sex, Religion and Marrying too Young by Rochelle Siemienowicz is published by Affirm Press and available now.
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