Embodied Screen Desires

There is an obvious tension between one’s private experience of sex and watching sex acts on the big screen. Still, seeing a sex scene in the cinema can feel like an intimate encounter, despite the public setting—in the dark, where one is free from worldly distractions and with the screen as the sole focal point, it becomes possible to sink into your seat and to let desires reverberate.

It’s not only on-screen sex that evokes a visceral bodily response; crying in the cinema can make one as uncomfortable as arousal can, though the former is much more apparent to the people around you. As film scholar Linda Williams argues in the introduction to her book Screening Sex: “Movies move us, often powerfully. Sex in movies is especially volatile: it can arouse, fascinate, disgust, bore, instruct, and incite. Yet it also distances us from the immediate, proximate experience of touching and feeling with our own bodies, while at the same time bringing us back to feelings in these same bodies.” In other words, we look at bodies to feel in our bodies, even though we can never share the exact same feelings as the characters on screen. Such were the thoughts lingering in my mind after leaving the cinema, having seen five short films grouped in a programme called “About Love”, part of the Vilnius Short Film Festival’s International Competition.

While those five titles were indeed shorts about different kinds of love, they all featured sex in some form as well as bodies which desire more than just sex but closeness and connection. I felt the tangible thread uniting the films as if was weaved through the characters’ bodies—even when the desired one’s body is absent—through the way the shorts showed physical expressions of such wants in varied, unruly and sometimes weird ways.

Even if not explicitly stated, there was also a queer, horny undercurrent running through all shorts in the programme: queer, as in sexuality, but also as in what is being shown somehow disrupting normative behaviours. In Samuel Suffren’s Dreams Like Paper Boats (2024), a father masturbates while listening to a tape recording of his late wife, her voice lingering like a ghostly presence. The protagonist in Naomi Pacifique’s looking she said, I forget (2024) is learning to navigate desire in a polyamorous, long- distance constellation. When she’s taking a shower with a male lover, she holds his penis while he pees—an act that, even if not meant as such in this context, feels queered. The scene decenters supposed “biological” notions of gender by not taking this depiction of genitals too seriously—it even portrays a wish on behalf of the main character to, at least in that moment, have different body parts.

A similar desire for a corporeal change is central also for Paula, the centaur-girl in Viktória Traub’s Shoes and Hooves (2024) who longs to swap her hooves for human feet. What follows, however is a closer look at the other two short films—Pigeons are Dying When the City is On Fire (2023) and you can’t get what you want but you can get me (2024)—the explicitly queer shorts which bookend “About Love”—as well as Happy Next Year! (2024), which screened in the National Competition.

Pigeons Are Dying, When the City Is on Fire (Stavros Markoulakis, 2023)

Everything is hot and laced with desire in Stavros Markoulakis’s Pigeons are Dying When the City is On Fire. In the afterglow of a hook-up, two men find a pigeon trapped in the flat and then spend the whole day driving and running through Athens with the pigeon in a pot. In the smouldering city heat, the men are burning for each other, and their glances, movements, and actions seem to be motivated by an urge to feel and taste the other’s body. When they do, it isn’t a considerate or careful kind of contact, and nothing is an obstacle—not the boiling temperatures, not the sweat, nor the sandy ground. Even when they’re riding together on a motorbike, their interactions exude a sexual charge, and the viewers are as aware of how close their bodies are as they themselves are.

Desire in Pigeons is messy and dirty, culminating in a scene that is in equal parts serious and silly. There, the two wrestle in the dirt, one blaming the other for the pigeon’s unfortunate death, eventually spitting on his face. Compositionally, the scene reminds one of another cinematic spit staple, the exchange between Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz in Sebastian Lelio’s film Disobedience (2017). But whereas the latter is tender, evident of one’s all-encompassing desire to consume the other through eagerly lapping them up, Pigeons portrays the same act as a playful demonstration of power, met with some disgust by the receiver. That swapping of bodily fluids is an intimate act that can leave the viewer feeling aroused, repulsed, or both. Wherever you land on this, recent cinema has given a lot of examples to suck on—be it Barry Keoghan’s character drinking spermy bathwater in Saltburn (2023) or that milk scene in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (2024)—showing that there is a fascination with, if not an appreciation of, such unlikely catalysts for desire.

However, desire exists because it can never be fulfilled entirely. Accompanied by yearning, its intensity differs from the word want, which implies tactility. Desire is strong, but also ephemeral, residing in the space between the self and the object of desire. Want and desire are connected, but we cannot use them as interchangeable verbs without distorting the meaning: To say I desire a glass of water instead of I want a glass of water sounds merely ridiculous, but there is a profound difference between saying I want you and I desire you. You can desire someone without actually wanting them, and sometimes a fantasy is just that.

Film allows us to observe and maybe even feel desire, but without worrying about the consequences in our lived reality. Because of that, cinema can be a safe space to understand desire. Years before I had figured out my own queer identity, I would religiously go through the whole filmographies of certain actresses I found attractive, and enthusiastically discuss these films with friends. Still, I couldn’t yet admit that my being profoundly affected in those cases revealed something about my own queer feelings—there is often a disconnect between a realisation about desire and an understanding of your (sexual) identity, even if a temporary one.

In Happy Next Year!, Sharunas has trouble reconciling his feelings about last night’s threesome. He wakes up next to Martin and Iveta (his long-term girlfriend) is in the shower. In its representation of desire, the short film sits opposite Pigeons, as the traces of consummated desire hang between the three bodies. Discomfort radiates from Sharunas’s every movement, and his reluctance to admit that sex with Martin was more than a drunken experiment is palpable.

With Happy Next Year!, director Lukas Kacinauskas brings to mind the harsh, sobering moment of stepping out of a club in the early morning hours, when the brightness and noises feel offensive after the dark ecstasy felt on the dancefloor. In daylight, the lingering (queer) desires feel more consequential for Sharunas, making him act like a petulant and overtired child, much to the annoyance of Iveta. Facing the awkwardly pointed distance, Martin decides to leave the apartment, but soon returns to pick up his tie. By then, Sharunas seems to have caught up with his desire and apologises, his earlier discomfort morphing into cautious vulnerability. When he hugs, kisses, and finally thanks Martin, he does so carefully, as if holding something precious, or to try out if last night’s feelings are still real. Sometimes, it takes years for the brain to catch up, sometimes only a few hours.

Happy Next Year! (Lukas Kacinauskas, 2024)

Watching sexual scenes in the cinema feels exposing, because it is rarely a solitary experience. A reactive audience can create a joyous collective environment, but it can just as easily disrupt the exchange of desire, leaving one painfully disconnected from the film and sharply aware of the public setting. Awkward laughter or a rude comment can be annoying, but influential—they can shape our perception of the film and ourselves afterward. Especially when what is shown on screen is outside the norm and at least partly reflective of our own experience, laughter at a sexual act or outright transphobic reactions can be stifling.

“The two long-haired trans guys alive rly should meet” reads a text at the start of you can’t get what you want but you can get me, a documentary short in slideshow format, which chronicles the t4t love story between co-directors Samira Elagoz and Z Walsh. Using candid photos and screenshots from various messaging apps, as well as songs by The Stokes, Alex Cameron, and Beach House, it shows the couple navigating their long-distance relationship and milestones like meeting the parents and undergoing top surgery. The film is explicit in its depiction of bodies and desire, the images showing naked bodies alone and intertwined, coupled with snippets of their horny texting. Thanks to the slideshow format, the viewer is only allowed glimpses of feelings and bodies, and, without the option to pause, desire flashes as ephemeral moments on the cinema screen.

Watching these images in the cinema in Vilnius, I felt a surge of protectiveness and discomfort. To be clear: the reason for my initial discomfort were never the images themselves, but realising how unpredictable the audience reactions can be, when seeing trans love and naked trans bodies. Cinema has a long track record of showing and reproducing transphobic portrayals and I feel that way every time I am seeing trans stories in the cinema. While there were no (audibly) bad reactions at the screening in Vilnius, a part of me still wants to protect those images from the prying eyes of cis people—even if I know the filmmakers want them to be seen and they partly serve educational purposes. A public portrayal of trans love and desire is inherently political, combating harmful policies and narratives perpetuated by the film industry and politics alike, but because of those dire circumstances, it is easy to forget that also, it’s simply a joy to see two trans people thrive in spite of societal obstacles.

Like the film’s title suggests, we can’t always get what we want, and that is also true for some of our desires. But maybe there are some things that we can get, like getting lost in a film in a safe environment that allows us to be moved and feel present in our bodies.