The 2013 Penélope Cruz short film banned for being too sexy: “I’d rather be called a pervert”
Hopefully, you’ll see the irony in a short film being called too sexy for the Internet, because that’s where all the porn lives. And yet, when Penélope Cruz made a foray into writing and directing, collars got too hot, pearls were clutched, and her work was banned.
The actor, who’s never scripted or helmed a feature, took charge of a 2013 short film that understood the assignment. A little too much, you could argue, since after being uploaded to YouTube, it was either pulled, censored, or deleted, lest it warp some impressionable young minds.
There’s also the irony in Cruz, who many producers and filmmakers tried so hard and ultimately failed to typecast as a sex symbol because she wasn’t interested in being reduced to eye candy when she was dead-set and determined to prove herself on the strength of her performances, coming under the flak.
The three-time Academy Award nominee and one-time winner was catapulted to early stardom in 1992 with her big-screen bow in Jamón jamón, but she was concerned that shooting nude scenes in her first movie would have an adverse effect on her career, admitting, “I remember the last day of filming, I was crying, saying, ‘What if I never shoot a movie again? The feeling was devastating.”
She didn’t let it hold her back, though, and by the early 2000s, she’d established herself as one of European cinema’s leading lights and had cracked Hollywood. When it was time to step behind the camera, sexuality was at the forefront of her thinking for different reasons, with Cruz wielding the megaphone on L’Agent by Agent Provocateur, leaving some folks up in arms.
The short, which features a cameo from Javier Bardem, naturally, follows a man who walks into a mansion full of scantily-clad models. Some of them are upside down, some of them are in a paddling pool, but that’s beside the point. The twist is that the poor lad’s been daydreaming the whole time, and he’s actually been working on a building site with Bardem.
“I did the whole thing,” Cruz beamed. “I directed, wrote the script, and I cast every single woman there. I wanted it to be a celebration of female beauty.” That’s very much what it is, and as a promo designed to sell lingerie, it was almost inevitable that the rampant hypocrisy of the porn-loving internet would be on show.
“It was even censored on YouTube, did you know that?” she asked. “There are so many violent films on there, and they don’t even check your age or ask for your email address before you watch them. We actually got a lot of hits because people were curious: ‘How come they banned this video?’ ‘Is Penélope Cruz perverted?'”
Of course, Penélope Cruz is not perverted, but she took the backlash in her stride. “I don’t mind,” the star declared. “I’d rather be called a pervert for that than the violence they allow teenagers to watch.” Pervert or not, she made the right impression on the right people.
