Has the NC-17 Rating Become an Unworkable Anachronism?
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic On July 19, the MPA ratings board handed an NC-17 rating to “Passages,” Ira Sachs’s acclaimed drama about a very unusual love triangle (a man, a woman, and a megalomaniacal romantic sociopath).
The film was set to be released just two weeks later; Sachs and his distributor, MUBI, were understandably upset. The scene that triggered the NC-17 rating, as is often the case in situations like this one, was an extended sex scene (the MPA does not like things that are long).
As almost always happens, the filmmaker and the distributor immediately committed themselves to releasing the movie unrated. “There’s no untangling the film from what it is,” Sachs told the Los Angeles Times. “It is a film that is very open about the place of sexual experience in our lives.
And to shift that now would be to create a very different movie.” He’s totally right, of course. Yet in the days that followed, as I encountered numerous pieces in the media attacking the NC-17 rating that had been assigned to “Passages,” I got a very familiar feeling.
Read more on variety.com