O Amor Natural

In terms of our cultural attitudes about sex, we Americans often seem developmentally equivalent to 11-year-old boys panting over smudgy GIFs of nude crackheads on the CyberBordello Web site. Dutch director Heddy Hongmann's gently consciousness-raising documentary O Amor Natural illustrates how clueless most of us are in the face of a question Honigmann poses midway through her film: “What is the difference between indecency and eroticism?” Her device for exploring this question seems gimmicky at first blush: Carrying a book of newly discovered erotic poetry by the late Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, she randomly approaches elderly Brazilians and asks them to read and interpret his verse. Yet the intelligence, poise, and delight with which these startlingly sophisticated oldsters respond to Drummond's droll paeans to fellatio, penises (characterized as “leaping jaguars”), anal sex, etc. puts to shame any belief that there's something inherently absurd or discomfiting about senior sexuality. As the film unfolds, Honigmann gradually expands the interviews to let her readers hold forth about their own erotic exploits and sentiments. Footage of sexy young Brazilians unabashedly strutting their stuff on the streets and beaches of Rio embellishes Drummond's words with concrete images and places them in the context of a timeless erotic force that is the engine of not only his art but of the entire natural world. Granted, there's some shock value in hearing a petite octogenarian talk about her fantasies of borderline S&M sex (“The images are violent because I'm violent … none of that softy stuff”). But why should that be? So dispiriting is the prospect of desexualization through aging that Simone de Beauvoir once wrote the long, deeply depressing The Coming of Age on the subject. Why should it be so hard to imagine sexuality as an ever-unfolding adventure that continues beyond its purely functional (child-producing) years? And why does popular art have such a hard time dealing with this possibility in a mature, non-condescending way? O Amor Natural, to its credit, doesn't preach, whine, or try to explain the unexplainable. Instead, with a minimum of stylistic gimmickry or intellectual pretense, it reassures us that we don't need to sweat this aging thing too much: The fire will keep on burning as long as we keep it well-stoked. In the words of another salaciously versifying geezer, “Start me up/Once you start me up I'll never stop, never stop ...”