How to Film an Orgy Without Making Everyone Feel Grimy

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

You can't really tell what you're looking at, initially. You're upstairs. A cluster of leaves shakes in the breeze outside. Someone runs across the garden naked, long hair swishing, while slightly menacing ambient music builds. At this stage, this could either be a scene from a horror film, or a fashion ad. You swivel away from the window and pass two teenage girls snogging on the landing, with someone slumped in his pants at their feet—so, this is a house party?

Not quite. Right before everything goes dark, you catch a glimpse of a young guy in a baseball cap standing shirtless in a bedroom, holding up his mobile phone to film two people fucking. But this isn't amateur porn either. It's the discombobulating opening scene from Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story), a new French film out this weekend in the UK about teens in a nondescript town during a heatwave who end up shagging their way through a series of orgies filmed and posted on a Snapchat-like social media platform.

There's group sex, penis "helicoptering," and lots of close-up shots of the bare skin of women portraying GCSE-age girls. But it turns out the final edit—rated PG-12 in France and R-18 in the UK—is actually a censored version of what director Eva Husson originally had in mind.

"I couldn't really put too many drugs in the film," she says, "because there was already so much sex. It was going to be too explosive in terms of censorship in France, so I toned that down." Really? This is the softer version? "Yeah—you can talk about sex in film, you can talk about drugs, but sex and drugs together? It becomes really high-risk." Be that as it may, Husson's still made a film that's likely to spark a visceral reaction, in everything from its blase approach to full-frontal nudity to its portrayal of young people as sex-mad robots glued to their screens.

The plot comes from a series of true stories Husson remembers reading, back in the 90s, about teenagers fucking en masse in the US—or maybe it was Belgium? Or France, or Germany—and creating a sort of moral panic. Bang Gang isn't autobiographical, but draws a line between those news snippets and the universal teenage longing for freedom. It has extra potency given Husson's background.

She came of age at the advent of rave culture, when "one day you'd find someone and become completely smitten by them, and two days later you'd hardly remember their names. It was like, 'Who are you again?'" she says, mock-squinting behind her thick frames. And she's translated that sense of abandon into the film. It feels carefree, even if Husson did have to take the drug references down a notch in comparison to what she'd experienced after running away from home at 14 and floating through the rave scenes of Ibiza, Paris, and… Guernsey.

"There was a lot of partying in Guernsey at the time," she says, laughing. "I remember going to a rave in a castle there, and I had this boyfriend from Ireland—Glen. I was really high and I saw him kiss another girl and I was crushed for days." She's over it now, but that little moment runs parallel to one in the film, where a character's sense of being cheated on ends up igniting the entire group sex craze.

Pretty girl George is buzzing off half a pill, trying to block out the fact that her classmate Alex is now ghosting her and getting off with her best friend, when she gives the sex parties their name. "It's like a big bang," she says, giggling and curled up in the lap of Alex's floppy-haired sidekick Nikita as people strip and cop off around them. "All this magic exploding. A banging gang… the bang gang."

The notion of people freaking out about teens having sex—and I mean with each other rather than much older adults and pedophiles—is nothing new. In the UK, we still haven't figured out the vocabulary needed to understand teenagers as sexual being. It feels as though every few months another story comes out about a teen being criminalized for sexting their peer, or porn creating a dead-eyed swarm of adolescents who becoming numb to sexual intimacy and pleasure.

For that reason, filming the "bang gangs"—from casually filmed fellatio, to girls getting eaten out while their friends go at it a few steps away—ended up being the biggest challenge. "The things that scared me most were the collective sex scenes, because however open-minded I am, I've never been that comfortable with collective sex," Husson says, cringing slightly. "I couldn't sleep for days—I was like, 'what have I done? This is going to be a fucking disaster.'"

She avoided a mess by choreographing the most intimate sex scenes and chatting extensively to each cast member in the months before shooting, she says. She also had a bit of first-hand experience, having been filmed nude as a teen herself in films. "On the first day, I had them all gather in one room and get naked in front of one another. And it was very sweet because they all started running around in the nude, just having fun. In contrast, on the last day I almost had to pay the extras more for them to get naked"—and she laughs. "I was like, 'Oh guys, just the last effort,' while they were thinking 'Ugh, I can't stand the sight of naked people any more.'"

By the end of Bang Gang, you may well feel that way too. There's a lot of moody slow-motion and a heavy dose of Gus van Sant and Harris Savides' joint approach to lighting teen tedium. But it's beautifully shot—with help from Danish cinematographer Mattias Troelstrup—and likely to make your stomach lurch remembering the tug of school-age infatuation. Even if you didn't hit puberty when people were sending each other mobile phone photos of their dicks, you can still identify with the film's visual representation of the way everything feels so unbearably powerful at that age.

"It's more about reflecting the way a teenager sees the world," Husson says. "It's poppy, it's very bright, it's dense and intense. I wanted the movie to reflect that. It's about five degrees to the right, a heightened reality. And I wanted that."

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