STRANGE STRAIGHT LOVE WITH A HINT OF KINKY |
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1. Night Porter (Il portiere di notte) (1974), controversial film by Italian director Liliana Cavani, starring Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling. Thirteen years after WWII a concentration camp survivor (Rampling) and her tormentor, currently the night porter at a Vienna hotel, meet again and fall back into their sado-masochistic relationship. |
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2. The Piano Teacher (La pianiste) (2001), drama film directed by Michael Haneke, starring Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Magimel. The film is based on the novel The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. A young man romantically pursues his masochistic piano teacher. |
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3. In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korîda) (1976), Franco-Japanese romantic drama film directed by Nagisa Oshima. It is a fictionalized and sexually explicit treatment of an incident from 1930s Japan, that of Sada Abe. Based on a true story set in pre-war Japan, a man and one of his servants begin a torrid affair. Their desire becomes a sexual obsession so strong that to intensify their ardor, they forsake all, even life itself. |
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4. Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l'enfer) (2004), French drama film directed by Catherine Breillat. The film was adapted by writer/director Breillat from her novel Pornocracy. A woman employs a gay man to spend four nights at her house to watch her when she's "unwatchable". |
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5. Punish Me (Verfolgt) (2006), German drama film written by Susanne Billig and directed by Angelina Maccarone. Intense drama film deals with the obsessive relationship between a confused teenager and an elder woman. |
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6. Last Tango in Paris (1972), Italian romantic drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci which portrays a recent American widower who takes up an anonymous sexual relationship with a young, soon-to-be-married Parisian woman. A young Parisian woman begins a sordid affair with a middle-aged American businessman who lays out ground rules that their clandestine relationship will be based only on sex. |
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7. Ma Mère (My Mother) (2004), French-Austrian-Portuguese-Spanish film about the fictional story of an incestuous relationship between a 17-year-old boy and his attractive, promiscuous, 43-year-old mother. Directed by Christophe Honorè. Based on George Bataille's posthumous and controversial novel of the same name. When his father dies, a young man is introduced by his attractive, amoral mother to a world of hedonism and depravity. |
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8. The Pillow Book (1996), France, UK, Netherlands, Luxembourg, romantic drama film directed by British director Peter Greenaway. As a young girl in Japan, Nagiko's father paints characters on her face, and her aunt reads to her from "The Pillow Book", the diary of a 10th-century lady-in-waiting. Nagiko grows up, obsessed with books, papers, and writing on bodies, and her sexual odyssey (and the creation of her own Pillow Book) is a "parfait mélange" of classical Japanese, modern Chinese, and Western film images. |
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9. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), France, UK, romantic crime drama written and directed by Peter Greenaway. The wife of an oafish restaurant owner becomes bored with her husband and considers an affair with a regular patron. |
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10. Antichrist (2009), Denmark, Germany, France, Sweden, Italy, Poland, horror drama film written and directed by Lars von Trier. A grieving couple retreat to their cabin in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse. |