Full frontal

Bernardo Bertolucci's new movie, The Dreamers, challenges the taboo of male nudity and the stigma of the NC-17 rating.

NEW YORK - A smitten young man in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers steals a photo of his inamorata and puts it next to his private parts, then is embarrassed when she discovers it.

She appears quite complimented by this different kind of Kodak moment: a closeup that leaves nothing to the imagination.

Such scenes got an NC-17 rating slapped on the new film by the director whose oeuvre includes the 1972 X-rated Last Tango in Paris.

But in the three decades since, scenes with full-frontal male nudity usually can be timed with a stopwatch, while those with nude women can be measured with a sundial.

Even in The Full Monty, filmgoers didn't get the full monty.

Pop-culture observers maintain that's because a de facto sexism still exists in Hollywood, where women can parade around in the altogether but men can't.

Among the exceptions: Harvey Keitel has let it all hang out at least twice (The Piano and Bad Lieutenant) and Ewan McGregor at least four times, including the upcoming Young Adam. Bruce Willis in 1994's Color of Night, Kevin Bacon in 1998's Wild Things and Geoffrey Rush in 2000's Quills.

Elayne Rapping, a professor of women's studies and media studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said it's such as it ever was: You can look back to classic paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries and see fully clothed men with nude women.

"That's been a constant of Western culture for centuries in representational art. . . . The assumed viewer is male, and the woman is to be looked at for male pleasure," she said.

She said another reason there are few full-frontal male nude scenes is that it raises an issue of vulnerability for men.

"For a man to reveal his private parts is to be reduced to the position that women have always been reduced to, which is to be examined, to be judged," Rapping said.

Fox Searchlight's release of The Dreamers, uncut and with an NC-17 rating, has refocused attention on the issue of sexuality in movies.

"Americans are much more comfortable with extreme violence in their movies than any sexuality," said Stephen Gilula, Fox Searchlight's president of distribution. (The film is scheduled to open in the Tampa Bay area March 5.)

Gilula, who attributes Bertolucci's comfort depicting sex to his European upbringing, said his company decided to release the film with an adult rating because though NC-17 has become "sort of a scarlet letter . . . we felt it wouldn't be the liability everybody perceived it was."

Bertolucci's movie may help destigmatize the rating, he said: "I think it opens the door for the possibility for distributors to consider using the rating without assuming it's a liability."

Time was, even an X rating wasn't a drawback: John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy won the 1969 best-picture Oscar despite it.

"How is it in 2004 we are more puritanical than 30 years ago?" Bertolucci said.

And even before the exposure of Janet Jackson's right breast at the Super Bowl halftime show, Bertolucci talked about how kids at home in their rooms see what he deems an incredible amount of sex and violence. So, he wonders, why movies are so persecuted?

"The power of television is much, much greater than the power of cinema," he said.

Philip Kaufman, who directed the first film to get an NC-17 rating, 1990's Henry & June, raised the question that many ask: Do women really want to see more male nudity?

"Maybe, in fact, just because of the nature of our society and so forth, more male nudity is about to come," Kaufman said.

When NC-17 supplanted X, mostly because X had been commandeered by the porn industry, it retained a smutty stigma.

But maybe that will change, Kaufman said. NC-17 will yet be matter-of-factly applied to films of "higher motive."

Gilula, of Fox Searchlight, certainly hopes so. And he thinks The Dreamers might be the watershed.

"It's a film of very serious intent. It has sex in it. But it's also about music, it's about politics, it's about relationships. It's about a lot of things. And it's about movies," he said. "Anyone who's going for any salacious intent, I think, will probably be disappointed."

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