Heated exchange... Film Lovers Will Love This.
Forgive me if this gets too personal, but I am forced to confess a certain sexual ignorance. I've just watched Film Lovers Will Love This, the notorious EU advert that has already got several MEPs hot under the collar. Produced by the European Commission, Film Lovers ... is a stylish, soft porn horn-of-plenty. It features straight sex and gay sex; tender sex and violent sex; sex in the kitchen and sex in the "toilettes". And quite frankly I didn't really understand it.
All right, it's not so much the sex that's confusing. Spare me the details but I'm familiar with the rudiments. I can even understand why certain over-ardent types might opt to do it in a "toilette" - presumably one that has just been cleaned and contains securely lockable doors that extend to the floor. No, the thing that baffles me about the EU advertisement is that - try as I might - I can't work out what it's an advertisement for.
Let's study the evidence. Film Lovers ... runs for a fevered 44 seconds and wraps up with an invitation to "come together". This, I'm guessing, is the European Commission's way of fostering some kind of intra-continental solidarity while simultaneously raising the prospect of, you know, maybe one day copping off with a foreign chick.
But then this slogan spins away to be replaced by another. "Millions of cinema lovers enjoy European films every year," it tells us. And then another: "Europe supports European films". And beneath this is a corporate logo for something called MEDIA.
And this, surely, is the clue we've been looking for. It suggests that the sex scene montage is selling some notion of European film and plugging some EU-backed scheme to promote it.
But what, exactly, is MEDIA? In desperation we turn to the official MEDIA website. This informs us - and I quote - that "the MEDIA Programme is administered by the MEDIA Unit at the Directorate of Information Society and Media of the European Commission. The Unit is responsible for the political, institutional, budgetary and communication aspects of the programme as well as its overall evaluation. A separate body, the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency manages operational delivery of the Programme."
I'm not sure quite what all this means, but it doesn't sound obviously sexy.
In this, as in most things, I blame Haagen Dazs. Back in the 1980s some Madison Avenue hipster had the idea of rebranding ice cream as a kind of sexual hors-d'oeuvres for supermodels (as opposed to, say, a comfort food for obese depressives in miu-mius) and since then sex has been used to sell everything from life insurance policies to the "operational delivery" of obscure federal programmes.
The latter, I suspect, is the humdrum reality that lurks behind all those explosive fantasy couplings. That said, I figure I should probably watch the film a few more times - just to be certain.
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