Natasha Walter: Are we ready for sex on the screen?

'What surprises me in the reaction to this film is the absence of the stomping fury we might have expected a few years ago'

Thr film director Patrice Chereau has been telling interviewers that he is rather surprised by the way that people are reacting to his new film, Intimacy. Can you believe it: journalists have been focusing on the sex in the film! Yes, there's been more chat about the upright penises than, say, the cinematography, the script, or the performances.

Hanif Kureishi, who wrote the stories on which the film is based, has said that he tried to warn Chereau that the British would be obsessed by the fact that there is a real oral sex in the film. "When the film won first prize at Berlin, he did a press conference and all they asked about was that. He was really shocked."

Eh, quelle surprise, Patrice! You make a film about a sexual relationship, and you include a few detailed shots of your star's penis, at one point as it slides into his co-star's mouth – and, how bizarre, people talk about it. I can't help thinking that Chereau is being just a teeny bit disingenuous when he says that he didn't expect such a reaction. If he didn't want people to talk about the sex, why didn't he do a typical Hollywood shadow-dance when it came to the act?

In fact, despite Kureishi's comments, what surprises me most in the reaction to this film is the total absence of the sort of stomping fury we might have expected just a few years ago. Do you remember the banner headlines when Adrian Lyne's film of Lolita was released, or David Cronenberg's Crash? On both of those occasions, many film critics came out in favour of censorship.

Intimacy isn't released until the end of the week, so things might change. But I doubt it. Apart from some kneejerk jokes by the tabloids (take the News of the World: "This film might be better on stage. In Bangkok.") the most horrified response that I've heard so far has come from Germaine Greer. The great heroine of sexual liberation, who once starred in her own intimate exposure – when she was photographed in Suck in 1971 – has said that she hated the sex in Intimacy. "They shouldn't have done it," she said to me on Newsnight Review last week. But as we went on arguing, it became clear that what she objected to was the fact that the sex didn't measure up to her exacting standards, rather than that it shouldn't be there at all.

But apart from her disapprobation, we have seen hardly a shudder of outrage, and hardly a hint of a demand for censorship. Okay, a film that shows a real blow job gets an 18 certificate in Britain, whereas it received a 12 certificate in France. But just a few years ago it would have been taken for granted that showing an erect penis, let alone fellatio, would not be possible in a mainstream release in Britain. Indeed, it was only last year that British guidelines about what should be permitted on cinema screen were relaxed, after a survey of film audiences showed that most opposed censorship on sex scenes. Viewers were quite rightly far more concerned about the mainstream depiction of violence than of sex. So has the great British public turned at last?

Sue Clark, a spokeswoman for the British Board of Film Classification, has said that whereas British audiences have become accustomed to seeing real sex in foreign-language films – from the erotic Ai No Corrida, released 25 years ago, to the off-putting Romance, released two years ago – they might react very differently to sex being brought home in Intimacy, which, although it has a French director, is set in London with English-speaking actors.

It's true that in some ways we may still be more prudish than our European counterparts. Despite all the hyped-up expectation, from the front-page headlines to the champagne dinners and jacuzzis laid on for Helen and Paul by Channel 4, sex did not materialise in this run of Big Brother, while it's become a commonplace in the show in other countries. But I don't know that there really is that much to divide us from our European counterparts any more. Who believes that the British are still stuck on Carry On films and cheeky postcards?

I'm not suggesting that the current wave of increased frankness about sex on film is a straightforwardly good thing. Already, it seems absurd that actors seem to feel so pressured to strip in order to be seen as serious performers. The sight of Sharon Stone's vulva or Gwyneth Paltrow's breasts will never appreciably add to their starry aura. It's been said before, and it will be said again, that the screen giants of yesteryear never needed to strip off their Balenciaga evening gowns to look sexy. And you can't help feeling sorry for the actors of tomorrow if this trend continues and the pressure remains high to do what used to be confined to Soho peepshows for audiences of millions.

But there is one thing to look forward to: at least the gradual dismantling of censorship in the cinema means that the exposure isn't all one way. For too long the women alone have been judged simply on the desirability of their body parts – clock the current licking of chops over Halle Berry in Swordfish – but if the cameras no longer have to stop at the men's belts, they too might be forced to wonder if they can measure up. That's equality for you, guys.

And what really matters, at the end of the day, is the worth of the individual work. Tired old questions such as "Is it pornography or is it art?" tend to fade away when you're stuck in the cinema for an evening. What you have to ask is, "Is it any good?" Other recent films that were weak on both ideas and execution have been tirelessly over-hyped because of the appearance of the occasional erect penis. The absurd Danish film The Idiots and the nasty French film Romance were cases in point – films that would have sunk without a trace if we hadn't been eager to debate whether the censors would let them in.

I had assumed that Intimacy would be like The Idiots or Romance – a weak film that was using controversy to gain attention. But I was surprised. It's a fine, subtle film. Unlike those other movies, Intimacy makes the inclusion of Mark Rylance's excited body simply part of an intelligent treatment of relationships, a treatment that is adult in the best sense of the word. The tender, frank approach to sex reminded me of the detailed aesthetic nuances of an artist such as Lucian Freud, or the unromantic sexuality of a novelist such as Doris Lessing.

Only 60 years ago, Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary that he wished that he could be free of the censors' influence. "I feel very much the futility of describing sexual emotions without describing the sexual act. I should like to give as much detail as I have to the meals, to the two coitions, with his wife and Julia. It would be no more or less obscene than to leave them to the reader's imagination. There is a gap in which the reader will insert his own sexual habits instead of those of my characters."

The freedom that writers won for themselves generations ago has come more slowly to films. Now that film directors have it, there will undoubtedly be in the cinema, as there has been in literature, a lot of shlocky material that we might wish the creator had censored in the absence of laws of censorship. But from time to time there is what Evelyn Waugh longed for – a frankness that helps the individual vision to flower.

n.walter@btinternet.com