Movies like Fifty Shades of Grey

Luis Buñel’s surreal classic sees a middle-class housewife Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) electing to become a daytime prostitute while her husband is at work. While there is some brothel-based kink, the key BDSM content lies in the dream sequences, in which Séverine fantasised about an S&M relationship with her husband. Based upon Joseph Kessel’s 1928 novel, Belle de Jour would inspire a real-life escort, her books and the UK TV series Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, which featured several S&M scenes.

The Fifty Shades Of Grey of its day, 9 1/2 Weeks is based on Elizabeth McNeill’s semi-autobiographical book, and sees Mickey Rourke’s mysterious Wall Street broker casting a sexual spell over Kim Basinger’s timid divorcee. Cross-dressing and public sex lead to whipping and boundary-testing galore. While relatively unsuccessful on home ground, the film found its audience abroad and became a cult favourite on video and later DVD.

Most audiences can handle a light spanking, but Crash ups the kink factor by exploring a world in which characters indulge their sadomasochistic desires by engineering car crashes. Defiantly provocative and certainly not for the squeamish, David Cronenberg’s film was released in a R version, as well as a NC-17 for adults only. Rumours that Cronenberg might direct Fifty Shades Of Grey turned out to be wisthful thinking.

Clumsy, awkward young woman meets a mysterious domineering businessman called Mr Grey and develops a submissive relationship with him. Sound familiar? It’s hard to believe 50 Shades writer EL James wasn’t influenced by this witty Sundance favourite that seeks to normalise the idea of the BDSM relationship. It also made a star of Maggie Gyllenhaal, who brought every-girl fragility to her role opposite cool, calm Crash star James Spader. At it again, eh, Spader?

A concentration camp survivor develops a complex S&M relationship with her torturer in this controversial drama from Italian arthouse director Liliana Cavani. Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling star as the pair who resume their relationship after the second world war, while he is working as a night porter. A striking, disturbing study of power, sexuality and transgressive behaviour, it features a topless Rampling dancing in a Nazi cap and leather gloves.

Gerard Depardieu stars as a small-time crook called in to fix the plumbing of a professional dominatrix (Bulle Ogier). This may sound like the premise for a straight-up porno, but while it pushed censors to the limit with its explicit dungeon scenes, this French arthouse film was downgraded to from an X to an 18 certificate in the UK in 2003.

Billed as “the first fetish feature film”, this London-set indie became a firm favourite on the fetish scene while narrowly avoiding the porn tag. This witty, kitsch look a kinky clubbing stars Guinevere Turner as a dominatrix under government investigation. “Turner makes Sharon Stone look like a mother superior,” Empire magazine declared.

Tackling the thorny topic of self-mutilation as a form of sexual arousal, this French-Austrian thriller benefits from a masterful performance from Isabelle Huppert as the music professor hiding a wealth of fetishes behind her repressed exterior. Based on Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel, Michael Haneke’s film is a complex and often uncomfortable watch that scored highly on the festival circuit.

Fifteen years after Crash, David Cronenberg explores BDSM via a love triangle between Jung (Michael Fassbender), Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and their complicated patient Sabina (Keira Knightley), who had a fondness for spanking. Knightley certainly doesn’t hold back when it comes to being flogged by Michael Fassbender, although she admitted to slugging vodka before filming that particular scene.

Based on David Ives’s play, Roman Polanski’s film remains theatrical in tone but is never less than absorbing. After arriving late for an audition, a seemingly chaotic actress (Emmanuelle Seigner) begins to play erotic power games with a director (Mathieu Amalric). The story revolves around Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novella Venus In Furs, a ground-breaking portrait of female dominance and male submission.

Some of the films listed here are obvious precursors to “Fifty Shades Of Grey,” but “The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant” obviously shares DNA with the recently released “The Duke Of Burgundy” (which is discussed down the list). Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and based on his own heavily autobiographical play (a veiled version of the triangular relationship between the director, his lover Günther Kaufmann and his assistant/composer Peer Raben), ‘Bitter Tears’ follows the titular fashion designer (Margit Cartensen) as she falls deeply in love with the beautiful Karin (Hanna Schygulla) while tormenting her devoted assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann). A unashamedly melodramatic nod to Fassbinder’s beloved Douglas Sirk and "All About Eve" (that film’s director Joseph Mankiewicz gets a name check at one point), the film doesn’t have that much in the way of whips and chains but is more effective than most at depicting the raw, brutal power dynamics of a sub/dom relationship, thanks in part to claustrophobic staging from the director and future Scorsese DP Michael Ballhaus. Not to mention Cartensen’s fearless turn and Hermann show-stealing, virtually silent performance.

Published in 1954, Anne Declos’ Marquis de Sade-influenced novel “Story Of O” (published under the nom de plume Pauline Reage) was one of the most important literary works in introducing BDSM to a wider audience —as a literary phenomenon, it was inevitable that the book would make it to the screen at some point. “Wages Of Fear” and “Les Diaboliques” helmer Henri-Georges Clouzot unsuccessfully attempted to mount an adaptation at one point, but it eventually reached the screen thanks to “Emmanuelle” director Just Jaeckin in 1975. It’s largely plot-free, involving a young woman called O (Corinne Cleary) whose lover Rene (Udo Kier) brings her to a chateau to be initiated in the world of sadomasochism by his step-brother Sir Stephen (Anthony Steel). It’s a clear forerunner to ‘Fifty Shades,’ though the exploits are a fair bit more hardcore and shares many of the same dramatic weaknesses. If your inclinations line up with the film’s ensemble, there might be some allure (though the presence of Kier is, frankly a little off-putting), but the characters are so blank, the material so repetitive, and the direction so cheap and shoddy (and often unintentionally funny, like the LOL-tastic owl mask that O wears at the end) that it’s typically hard for the non-inclined to get anything out of it. Still, the whole thing’s on YouTube, though the film was banned in the UK until 2000.

It might feel like unsimulated sex scenes in serious arthouse cinema is a relatively recent invention in light of films like “The Idiots,” “9 Songs,” “The Brown Bunny,” “Shortbus” and “Nymphomaniac." But “In The Realm Of The Senses,” from the late Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, caused significant fuss four decades ago. Technically a French production (Japanese laws only allowed the explicit film to be made as a foreign production), it’s set in Tokyo in 1936, as the owner of a hotel (Tatsuya Fuji) begins a boundary-pushing relationship with a maid (Eiko Matsuda) who used to be a prostitute. Based loosely on a real-life event involving a woman named Sada Abe and with the Japanese title “Ai No Corrida” (which translates literally as “Bullfight Of Love,” which is rather more fitting), it’s a portrait of an all-consuming love affair. But while it has political (and particularly in the context of the others films on this list, feminist) overtones, this film manages to effectively mix the sensual and the disturbing. Though obviously there’s more of the latter in the film’s famous finale, in which Fuji is strangled to death mid-coitus and Matsuda then cuts his penis off. It’s a tremendous example of using real sex as a storytelling technique rather than as pure titillation.

Pedro Almodovar never met a sexual taboo he didn’t want to bust, and “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” sees the director get his kink on in satisfying fashion, even if the film doesn’t rank among his best. A comic precursor to the much-later “The Skin I Live In,” the film marked the end of a chapter for Almodóvar; he fell out with muse Carmen Maura in pre-production, after telling her she was too old for the female lead (they wouldn’t work together until they reconciled for “Volver”), and it marked his last collaboration for two decades with Antonio Banderas, who went to Hollywood after the film’s success. As for ‘Tie Me Up!,’ it’s difficult; essentially a sweet romantic comedy, but one where the obsessive behavior often seen in the genre is taken to new extremes, with Banderas’ mental patient kidnapping a porn-actress-turned-horror-starlet (Victoria Abril), with whom he once slept with, and who he keeps tied to her bed, eventually with her consent. There are troubling aspects —the film was derided by feminists on release— but the film’s sweetness, provided by vulnerable, big-hearted turns by Banderas, Abril and Loles Léon, makes it work. The film’s also earned its place in cinema history for reasons beyond its quality: Miramax sued the MPAA after the film was given an X rating, kicking off a debate that would eventually lead to the creation of the NC-17 rating.

This is legendary filmmaker (and fugitive from justice) Roman Polanski’s stab at BDSM. Nigel (Hugh Grant) and Fiona (Kristen Scott Thomas) are a bored, married couple on a cruise to Istanbul, passing through India. They come across Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner) and her paraplegic husband, Oscar (Peter Coyote), a couple very into BDSM. Oscar first tormented Mimi, humiliating her constantly and forcing her into an abortion, then, after Mimi renders him paraplegic, she relishes both dominating and humiliating him, having sex with other men in front of him. Nigel finds himself taken by Mimi, but she may prove too hot and twisted for him to handle.

Paul Verhoeven’s erotic phenomenon starred Michael Douglas as Nick Curran, a detective investigating the case of a rock star who was brutally stabbed to death with an ice pick by a mystery blonde. The prime suspect is Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), an icy, bisexual writer with a penchant for bondage. While the leg-crossing scene is the most iconic, there are also several sexy BDSM scenes here featuring Stone tying Douglas to the bed and riding him like Seabiscuit.