The Critics: Cries & whispers

A film-maker friend upbraids me for being so naive as to imagine - as I did last week - that young Christien Anholt might really have had his nips pierced for the film Preaching to the Perverted. Simple continuity rules this out, my dears! "If he'd really had his nipples done, his chest would have had two great swollen raw lumps on it next day," says my friend, who seems strangely knowledgeable on these matters. And since Anholt spends most of the time cavorting in a thong, bung goes your shooting schedule. Silly me.

I find myself curiously drawn to matters of the flesh this week. A screening of the new Mira Nair film, Kama Sutra, has reactivated a theory of mine about, well, about - this is no time to beat about the bush, Dillie, get on with it! - pubic wigs. Muff-wigs, if you will, though my diminutive friend, the novelist Nicholas Royle, insists that the correct name for such an appurtenance is "merkin".

Time was when you had bum-shots and breast-shots, but you rarely got more than a glimpse of pubic hair. But now actresses reveal more and more. You remember the scene in Jude when Sue Bridehead doffs her kit and the entire audience goes "Ohhhh! So that's what Kate Winslet looks like naked!". And there she is, stretched out on the bed, sporting a very trim triangle of what looks like Axminster.

Well, in Kama Sutra the very lovely Sarita Choudhury strips and reveals a dense, impenetrable patch of vegetation on her belly. (Sarita, darling, if it's all yours then I apologise).

Well, I've seen a fair bit of female flesh in my time (in the dormitories at the College for Young Ladies, I hasten to add), and all this luxuriance looks very suspicious to me.

Nearly every film person I have asked has found the idea quite improbable, "how would you stick it on?" being the main objection. Explanations offered for the uniform thickness of luvvie pubes have ranged from "you can add or take away anything with digital technology", to the fact that that in LA there are now pubic hairdressers. Perhaps among my readers there is a merkin-wrangler who can share trade secrets?

Red Shoe Diaries, a soft-porn US cable show featuring David Duchovny, is now available on video. Spooky Dave plays a lovelorn chap who puts a classified ad in the paper to find women who'll share their sexual fantasies with him. Sadly, our Dave's appearances are limited to looking soulful at the beginning and end of each episode as he takes out and reads yet another sexy missive. Still, it's glossy stuff with the likes of Charlotte Lewis (so that's where she went!), Maryam D'Abo, Sheryl Lee and Ally Sheedy as the libidinous tottie.

Aaargh! I was warned, you know. Never tangle with poets. (Or Buddhists for that matter.) You remember the versifier I wrote about a few weeks ago, the one who went on a hunger strike, threatened suicide and is marching to Downing St to draw attention to his unpublished work? He writes again, making a vow of celibacy, and promising to wash his "private facets in cold water every night before retiring". A colleague points out that the letter is strangely stained. Ugh! I'm off for a cold shower.