Even more celebrated is the sex scene that comes a half-hour into the film, as Sutherland and Christie undress and roll around on the bed, touching one another in the way that a real couple might. First, we see Christie sitting naked in the bath, and then watch a naked Sutherland brush his teeth and sit nude at a drafting table. The ensuing lovemaking is surprising in its fair degree of frankness — you wouldn't necessarily expect Sutherland and Christie to get naked in a film — but what makes it unique in the history of love scenes is the way Roeg chooses to envision it. Bits of clothing sliding off of bodies are intercut with the couple getting dressed again to go out for dinner. As Sutherland rolls Christie around on top of him, the fleshy sexual image gives way unexpectedly to pictures of him finishing dressing and waiting in the bedroom as she applies her makeup in the bathroom. He appears at least tranquil, but she seems almost joyously happy. At any rate, their solitary domesticity is an intriguing and unavoidable counterpoint to sexual coupling. And just like that, Roeg's dark fable is inhabited by real people whose state of mind we feel we have become intimately familiar with.

The sequence also underscores the way in which nudity and sex in films has generally moved over the past 25 years from the realm of the erotic into that of the merely prurient. Roeg demonstrates that putting nudity in film is easy, eroticism quite a bit harder, and that imparting actual meaning during the sex act is the duty of a poet.