Love-making scenes often come as ornaments in a Hollywood film, pepping it up, garnishing it, making it attractive.
But there are a few films where sexual scenes are a part of the argument of the film. They become essential to the structure of the film adding thematically and intellectually to it.
The Reader is one such movie. Anybody who has seen The Reader would be struck by the sexuality depicted in the film. Here's a guy, not yet past his teens and here's a woman in her mid 30s or early 40s. The woman induces the boy into his first sexual act. Before the boy had understood what a woman was, he was already introduced to his sexual side. Suddenly. Abruptly. Without any prior notice. Michael seems to turn into a tiger who for the first time has the taste of flesh and blood. It seems that he is beginning to enjoy his new found manhood. But anybody would guess this. It's most natural. But what is not natural is Hanna's behaviour, her
psychology. Why did she have sex with a person so much younger to her? She calls him 'kid'. One begins to realize soon the pathetic emotional vacuum with which Hanna has been psychologically fighting for so long. Alone. There's no man in her life. And she knows that no man would ever fall in love with a Nazi guard. So she has destroyed the emotion of love by complete repression. All now she cares for is quenching her physical thirst. And she is ready to take it from any man. The age really seems immaterial. The love-making scenes in the film are therefore ambivalent. From Michael's point of view, it's a new experience, an adventure and from Hanna's point of view it's a means of survival, a necessity. And this ambivalence adds a sheen of sad beauty to the love-making scenes and make them complex, unpredictable and intense.