Explicit sex in Mexican film causes stir at Cannes

CANNES, France - The world may not be waiting for a feature film showing two obese Mexicans having sex after their attempt to kidnap a baby goes horribly wrong, but Carlos Reygadas said on Sunday his film captures real life.

The Mexican director of Batalla en el Cielo (Battle in Heaven) said he included explicit scenes using his cast of non-professional actors because sex consumes everyday life, and he considers carefully scripted cinema sex to be a farce.

His couple are in unaesthetic middle-age.

"Most people look more like them than the beautiful people you see in advertisements," Reygadas told a news conference after screening of his competition entry at the Cannes film festival.

"I never wanted to film fat people making love," he added. "These were just two people. They weren't beautiful." Reygadas said his film - which drew some boos and whistles at a press screening, and questions from journalists at the news conference about the purpose of the sex scenes - was the antithesis of pornography.

He said he included scenes that shocked - such as the opening, when a teenage girl performs fellatio on the overweight Mexican man - to draw viewers into the story.

"It's not a sex film or a porn film," he said. "Porn aims to sexually excite the viewer. That's not what this is about. It was to create a sense that this goes much further than simple sex. There's a mystery behind it."

After the graphic opening, it turns out the middle-aged man, Marcos, is a chauffeur whose kidnapping with his wife of a middle-class Mexico City family's baby is botched. The baby dies mysteriously.

Reygadas noted that kidnappings are common in Mexico.

Marcos, played by Marcos Hernandez, then gets intimate with his boss' attractive but troubled young daughter Ana, played by Ana Mushkadiz. Both were amateurs with no experience in acting.

Marcos confides his dark secret to Ana, who despite her family's wealth works in a brothel for amusement. She tells him to go to the police. They have sex again. He later kills her.

"The whole world is involved in sex," said Reygadas, whose last film Japon made a splash at a previous Cannes festival for an extraordinary sex scene between a middle-aged man and an elderly woman. "Things happen when people make love. That's what this film is about. It's how we relate to it."

Reygadas said he wanted amateur actors for his film. He also said he finds absurd the way many commercial films carefully arrange bed sheets in a completely unrealistic way to conceal body parts during sex scenes, or use actors with perfect bodies.

"I said 'no professional actors, please'," he said. "The aim of this film was to capture the essence of the characters and I wanted to do that with non-professional actors who didn't have any particular acting technique."

He said Marcos, who has worked with his father at the Ministry of Culture in Mexico for decades, had long been a close friend. He discovered Ana, an art designer, at a casting.

Both said they weren't sure they would ever act again.

"I never wanted to be an actress," she said. "If nothing ever comes my way again, I don't care at all."

- REUTERS