Chapter 9 - Lessons in Seduction

Summary

Chapter 9 is about eroticism and seduction. Ovid’s Ars amatoria (The Art of Love) is a sophisticated, although today not quite politically correct, guide to romance, love, and lovemaking, in which Ovid presents himself as teacher of love. The Art of Love is of elementary (and elemental) interest to the cinema, a medium that rarely if ever neglects the appeal of love and romance. Polish director Walerian Borowczyk, a major but also controversial figure of European art cinema, made an idiosyncratic feature film of The Art of Love and, for the first and only time so far, put Ovid himself on the screen as protagonist. Consideration of this film includes analyses of on-screen nudity and sexuality: eroticism vs. pornography. Next, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut comes in for extensive critical discussion, for in an early sequence an Old-World seducer puts the moves on a pretty American wife by explicitly referring to Ovid. He reveals himself, however, as an incompetent reader who gets nowhere. By contrast, another film by Max Ophüls, La ronde, comes closest in spirit to the wit, elegance, and sophistication of Ovidian eroticism. The Roman master at the game of love here finds his most congenial descendant. Brief considerations of several thematically related other films end this chapter.