In January, the superhero flick Kick-Ass prompted some controversy with far-right groups in Australia after it was rated MA. The film, which features sequences of violence and aggressive coarse language from a 12 year-old girl, prompted this response from Australian Family Association Australian Family Association spokesman John Morrissey, "the language is offensive and the values inappropriate - without the saving grace of the bloodless victory of traditional superheroes."

Now Matthew Vaughan’s film has been released in Australian cinemas (and has continued to create debate, as evident in this pretty heated “debate” on ABC’s At the Movies), it is time to take a look at other films which have found a storm of controversy in this country (asides from the last film in this series, which takes a look at the hypocrisies of so-called moralists as well as deviant, self-deluded proponents of extreme sexual and violent freedom like the Marquis de Sade).

Mysterious Skin
The Chicago Sun Times film critic Roger Ebert pointed out that the censors tend to disproportionably target the films that “get it right” when it comes to violence and sexuality. This is especially true of Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, which is as much a “how-to-manual” for paedophiles (according to Australian Family Association spokesperson, Richard Egan) as, say, The Silence of the Lambs is a “how-to-cookbook” for cannibalism. The bruising, beautiful Mysterious Skin is a sympathetic study of two troubled, perhaps lost, souls whose destinies are inescapably shaped by the same experience. One flaunts his sexuality in a perilous lifestyle of prostitution and unsafe sex whilst the other’s passive, diffident exterior conceals startling hostility and anguish. Mysterious Skin is a powerful film and Araki deserves appreciation for his sensitive illumination of the story’s chilling subject matter.

Anatomy of Hell
In Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell, a straight woman pays a gay man to watch her for four days where she will disrobe and discuss sexuality. The French film may be art, but its art is so misguided, so oft putting, so unmistakably wrong that it often ventures into lunacy. It is only 77 minutes long, but it feels more like an overextended short film rather than a full-length feature. The film could be seen as a feminist text, but it is easier to sympathise with this misogynist bloke than this barking woman, whose mind game is an extension of her desperate need for attention. Anatomy of Hell is like a critique of pornography as directed by a first-year philosophy student, as the writing seems so off-the-planet that it elicits unintended laughs: “even if you removed the hair from your crack you wouldn’t be rid of your obscene nature.”

9 Songs
Michael Winterbottom is nothing if not a versatile and innovative filmmaker (only the oeuvres of fellow Brits Danny Boyle and Sam Mendes have proved as consistently diverse) whose every work emerges as challenging and stimulating. At 69 minutes long, however, 9 Songs is not one of his best films. Like most “serious” films about sex, it is oddly tedious and decidedly unsexy, a thin sketch of a modern relationship defined by pop culture, casual drug use and unsimulated sex. 9 Songs proves an oddly voyeuristic experience; there is not much of an arc or a story to the film, but a series of quietly dispiriting fragments into two people’s banal sexual experiences.

Quills
Even by modern standards, the writing of the Marquis de Sade is shocking in its vacuous hedonism, exploiting the themes of rape, bestiality, paedophilia and necrophilia for the purpose of pornography under the guise of satire. According to Philip Kaufman’s outrageously entertaining Quills¸ the Marquis de Sade both a martyr for extreme freedom and repulsive, monstrous deviant whose work incites violence against women. As incarnated by a sprightly, gloriously entertaining Geoffrey Rush, the Marquis was an exploitative pornographer whose delusions of artistry conflict with Michael Caine’s Doctor Royer-Collard, a nasty hypocrite who projects moral outrage to mask his malice and cruelty. Their moral battles destroy the genuinely decent, moderate characters, including compassionate asylum administrator Abbé du Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix) and the beautiful laundress Madeleine LeClerc (Kate Winslet).

Andrew Moraitis