5 Movies to Watch If You Love Fifty Shades of Grey

Like a rolling thundercloud, or massive, erotic tsunami, you knew EL James’s multi-million-selling novel would arrive in cinematic form before too long. Devotees of the work have been debating the film’s merits since it was first announced, arguing over everything from the cast, to leaving out the book’s most controversial sex scene. In any event, after premiering at Berlin’s prestigious film festival (shockingly, to mostly tepid reviews by the critics in attendance), it has finally arrived in area theaters. If you love the conflation of relationship drama and ribald sex scenes, we have a few other films you might want to check out.

9 Songs (2004)

If you like: Graphic sex scenes without the burden of much of a storyline to weigh you down.

Then you should like: Michael Winterbottom's film concerning a sexually voracious couple enjoying extremely graphic sexual encounters cut between concerts they attend.

Comparison: Not particularly well-remembered, Winterbottom's restless handheld camera does capture the certain kind of sexual insouciance given to young couples without a hell of a lot to worry about. This, in itself, is a far cry from Fifty Shades' grinding emotional baggage (just what is haunting Christian, anyway?), but the backbone of both films remains the erotic charge the couple share, and the ways in which sex leads to intimacy whether you want it to or not.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1HWcofsxJk

In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

If you like: Couples endlessly ruminating about the nature of their relationship—and very graphic submissive/dominate sex.

Then you should like: The most notorious film in the illustrious career of Japanese auteur Nagisa Ôshima, Senses retells the true story of Sada Abe, a servant girl in pre-war Japan whose engulfing affair with her master ultimately leads them both down a peculiar road of destruction and death.

Comparison: While Ôshima's film is an example of high cinematic art (something for which Sam Taylor-Johnson's film will absolutely not be mistaken), there are many scenes of the doomed couple debating the nature of their obsessive love and where it might lead them, much like Christian and Anastasia. Well, that and extremely graphic oral sex.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP46wzCt-DA

Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)

If you like: Beautiful, young and inexperienced women falling head over heels in love with older, far more experienced lovers—and very graphic lesbian sex.

Then you should like: This Cannes Palm d'Or winner from a couple years back earned all sorts of ire, first from the two female stars (Léa Seydoux and Adéle Exarchopoulos), who felt the director Abdellatif Kechiche exploited them, then by the director himself, who renounced the entire enterprise by way of rebuttal, but it remains a powerful, erotic tale of the cycle of a young romance gone awry.

Comparison: The centerpiece of the film—much like the sexual centerpiece of Fifty Shades—is an extended (all together now: extremely graphic) sex scene between the two women that goes on for some long number of minutes and seems anything but simulated. Fifty Shades naturally is far more circumspect (the quick tufts of pubic hair you see on the two principles were strictly negotiated), but does more or less center itself on the erotic charge of their first encounter about mid-way through the film, which seems to go on for an extended period of time. (Available on Netflix Instant Streaming.)

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2OLRrocn3s

Endless Love (1981)

If you like: Young school-aged virgins falling into obsessional love and losing themselves in the process.

Then you should like: This early '80s camp classic from Franco Zefferelli, which starred a young Brooke Shields as a high school student who meets and falls helplessly in love with a young man from the wrong side of the tracks. When their love becomes too all-encompassing, her parents intervene and forbid her from seeing him … which leads to him, um, burning their house to the ground. True love, everyone!

Comparison: The obsessional thing certainly cuts both ways in the two films, as does the idea that the couples forsake the rest of their lives to feed into each other, but as demanding and controlling as Christian Grey is, he seems unlikely to be as unstable as our David Axelrod here, who gets committed to a mental asylum for his crime—and comes out years later, still thoroughly obsessed with his former GF.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS64ygmk0hc

The Duke of Burgundy (2014)

If you like: BDSM games between two consenting adults.

Then you should like: Peter Strickland's festival favorite, which made several critics' year-end lists, is an odd puzzle of a film. An homage to the erotically charged films of the '60s and '70s, it stars Sidse Babett Knudsen as a successful scientist and butterfly scholar and Chiara D'Anna as her young, impressionable sexual partner, as the two play increasingly complex sub/dom scenarios, and try to maintain the throughline of their relationship, even as the tenements and rules shift constantly between them.

Comparison: In the first installment of the Fifty Shades saga, Christian is just beginning to teach Anastasia the ways of the successful submissive, so what's depicted in Duke is a good deal more advanced (and, in must be said, psychologically nuanced), but you can still thrill to the ever-changing relationship dynamic, where the lines blur between who is actually calling the shots and whose dutifully obeying them.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-xIMBnclyA

Follow Piers Marchant @kafkaesque83