The Venice film festival (which is the oldest film festival in the world and remains one of the most prestigious) came to an end the week before last and it was Ang Lee's Lust, Caution that won it.
While this might seem irrelevant to the topic of this post, I assure you it's not ;) The trailer should give you an idea where I'm going with this:
Anyway, the film has received an NC-17 certificate from the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). Focus Features, the distributors of "Lust, Caution", have not appealed it or made any cuts for the American release which is very unusual. The NC-17 certificate is usually not regarded as an option even for less commercial films because this means many cinemas will not show it, many DVD rentals and stores will not stock it and many newspapers will not advertise it. While some art house films in the past have gone ahead with this certificate, it's the first time that such a mainstream director and a film that won such an important festival is going to be released as NC-17.
All the talk surrounding this has made me want to take a closer look at the MPAA and how the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) compares. The MPAA has often been accused of double standards (Hollywood films can get away with more than art house or foreign films, sex is treated much more severely than violence).
Perhaps the strangest thing about the MPAA is that nobody knows exactly who rates the films. All the names are kept anonymous. In fact, the whole thing is so fishy that last year a documentary was made about the MPAA in an attempt to shed some light on it (they even hired a private detective to find out who was sitting on the board!). See the trailer for this documentary here.
Apart from being very secretive about their members, the feedback they give to both the filmmakers and the general public about why films received certain ratings is very limitted comparing to what the BBFC does these days. Check out the quote below from one of the MPAA FAQs:
CARA does provide explanations to the submitter of each motion picture of the reasons for the rating assigned to that picture. However, any such discussions concerning a particular motion picture will be only with the submitter and are also considered confidential. Thus, the substance of discussions about a movie being rated by CARA cannot be discussed with the press or anyone else other than, where appropriate, the submitter of the particular motion picture.
Unfortunately, the level of detail given to submitters often isn't enough for their needs. This timeline of MPAA controversies describes many cases, but one stood out to me in particular. In 1983 Brian De Palma edited his "Scarface" three times to get a lower rating, but none of those three cuts passed. Clearly if they had given him the information he needed, the first cut would have passed their requirements (and oh irony, in the end he received the rating he wanted for his original unedited version!).
In contrast, the BBFC lists quite detailed reasons for the rating and cuts made to each film on their website (the older ratings are less detailed, but the more recent ones are usually very much so) and it also invites the public to "make its views known to the Board at any stage of the classification process".
I have two of my own theories about the MPAA (which you can take seriously or laugh at - whatever ;-P). My first is a conspiracy theory - I think they're consciously giving indie and foreign films harsher ratings and that it's one of their methods of ensuring the domination of the big Hollywood flicks on the US market.
Before you roll your eyes at me (actually you probably have already, but before you do it again ;-P), check out how the MPAA is funded. Here's a quote from the FAQ on one of the MPAA's official pages:
The movie rating system is a voluntary system sponsored by the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Association of Theatre Owners
Since you're probably not familiar with these organizations, I'll "translate". You might already be confused how the MPAA can be funded by the MPAA, so maybe I'll start with clarifying that. For whatever reason, when one talks of the American rating system, one talks of the MPAA giving the ratings (that's how imdb has it for example), but actually the ratings are done by a smaller body called CARA (Classification and Rating Administration) which is part of the MPAA. The MPAA itself is an older and bigger body - you can read about it in more detail here, but it's basically a body created to defend the interests of the major American film production companies - you can see the list of MPAA members (the six biggest studios in Hollywood) on their official site.
The National Association of Theatre Owners is an association of all the movie theatres in the US - most of which are part of cinema chains owned by the six companies already mentioned.
This puts the accusations of bias against foreign and independent films in a totally different light, doesn't it? Clearly it is in the interest of the sponsors of the rating system for films made outside of the six big studios to be given harsher treatment. Wikipedia actually says that Miramax had lots of problems with the rating system while they were an independent company, but now that Disney has bought them out, their problems have ceased!
The BBFC is funded in a much more independent way. See the quote below from their policy (avaliable on their official website):
The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is an independent, non-governmental body funded through the fees it charges to those who submit films, videos, DVDs and digital games for classification.
On the one hand this means that British distributors have extra costs (unlike in the US, every film in the UK must be rated or else it is illegal to show it to the general public), but clearly it is a system less open to bias.
My other theory is a cultural one - I honestly believe Americans have a different attitude towards sex than we do here in Europe. Just as in India the general attitude towards sex and sexual behaviours seems to be a lot more prudish than in the West (kissing in public is considered obscene and even hand holding can be seen as vulgar), so in the US it seems certain things are a lot more taboo than they are in Europe.
I thought that it was fascinating to compare reactions to Daniel Radcliffe doing a nude scene in Equus (which I covered extensively on this blog ;) - just click on the Equus tag below this post). In the UK it was a big thing, but at no point did I feel there were any moral judgements about it. It was amusing, maybe shocking, but I don't think many people felt that it was somehow morally wrong of him to be doing it. The voices from the US were different though. Just reading through imdb there were many people who felt this amounted to pedophilia and were wondering how his parents could allow him to do such a thing. There were also those who said they would boycott the "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" film. I'm not saying that all the responses from the US were like that, but certainly it did seem to be somehow "a bigger thing" over there.
In this context, I also found it very interesting to read William H. Macy's comment about the reactions to "The Cooler" (this was one of the few art house films that was released with an NC-17 rating):
William H. Macy said that when the film was shown in European film festivals, afterward people mostly discussed the script and the characters, but when the film was shown at American film festivals, people mostly discussed how good Maria Bello looked in her nude scenes.
I think these different attitudes are reflected in not just the decisions of the MPAA and BBFC, but also their guidelines. I did a sort of comparison of the guidelines for each certificate, which you can download here. I wanted to put it straight up in my post, but the formatting I wanted wasn't possible (it's not a big file, don't worry :) ). Most of the guidelines have been just copied and pasted. Pretty much all the MPAA guidelines I found are in that file, but I only put up part of the BBFC guidelines since there were many which couldn't really be compared against anything in the MPAA ones. The full BBFC guidelines are here.
Finally, two random things that I didn't manage to fit anywhere else in this post. Firstly I thought this article was a great read - particularly the list of silly rating reasons (my favourite was "“PG-13 for intense depiction of very bad weather”).
And also I found it amusing to hear about Alfonso Cuaron's protest against what various rating bodies around the world were doing to Y tu mama tambien.
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