'Red, White & Royal Blue' Slapped with 'R' Rating; Director Matthew López Responds

Another movie about a same-sex relationship, another seemingly too-strong rating from the MPA... and another openly gay filmmaker asking whether it's got more to do with the genders involved in the movie's sex scenes than the scenes themselves.

Recently, it was Ira Sachs pushing back against MPA handing down an NC-17 to Sach's complex relationship drama "Passages."

Now, it's playwright and director Matthew López, whose new film "Red, White & Royal Blue" premieres August 11 on Amazon, wondering aloud whether the rom-com about two hot, high-profile sons of political leaders would have been given an R rating if the romance it depicted was straight.

López described himself as "surprised" by the rating, which the MPA justified by pointing to "some sexual content, partial nudity and language," People Magazine reported.

"An adaptation of Casey McQuiston's 2019 bestseller, the film places actors Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine in a juicy romantic scenario: the U.S. president's son Alex Claremont-Diaz and England's Prince Henry fall for each other," People Mag summarized.

Indeed, the film does include a lingering moment of full rear nudity for Zakhar Perez in a comic scene when a high-powered handler bursts into a hotel room where the two young men share a moment of stolen bliss. And the film also includes a depiction of anal sex that manages to convey exactly what's going on – and the emotions driving the moment – without actually showing anything much.

Even so, "I do question whether or not if it had been a man and a woman, if we'd still gotten an R rating," López told the magazine.

Addressing the sex scene, López said that "while I never was encouraged to limit what we were showing or limit what I was depicting, the scene is what I intended to show. It plays exactly how I wanted it to play."

López evidently wanted it to play to the film's feel-good fantasy elements; he called "Red, White & Royal Blue" a "wonderful fairy tale," People Mag noted.

He's not wrong. The story is, in its own way, a modern take on the fairy tale of a handsome prince and a commoner, even if the commoner in question is the charismatic First Son, a talented political neophyte in his own respect.

"It made me understand how queer audiences don't actually get to participate in fairy tales themselves too often," López reflected, before going on to point out that "it feels like queer audiences are one of the main consumers of such stories, and yet we didn't have a lot of our own."

If every fairy tale includes an ogre, the MPA seems poised to assume that role here. Citing "the MPA's preference for violence over sexuality," López told People Mag, "I think if there had been a scene of violence between them, I could have kept a PG-13 rating, but because they're having sex and they're two men, we got an R."

Ira Sachs voiced similar doubts when talking about how "Passages" was tagged with an NC-17 rating. The film, about a married male couple wrestling with the fallout as one of the men embarks on an ongoing affair with a woman, includes both gay and straight sex scenes. "Passages" also contains male nudity, though nothing full-frontal, and a long sex scene between actors Franz Rogowski and Ben Whishaw that's more explicit than anything in "Red, White & Royal Blue," but arguably well within the realm of an R rating.

"What concerns me is the warning shot a rating like that gives to other filmmaker[s] about what images will be allowed without punishment," Sachs told the Associated Press.

Sachs expanded on his thoughts in a recent interview with EDGE. "I wasn't surprised, because I had already gone through this, in almost a more depressing way, with 'Love is Strange' getting an R rating," the filmmaker said, referencing his 2014 drama about a gay couple, played by Alfred Molina and John Lithgow, suffering economic and emotional distress when one of them is fired because they got married.

Sachs called out a filmmaking culture that he suggested is queasy when it comes to same-sex love. "The censorship of queer images exists from top to bottom," he told the AP. "It's not just the MPA. It's also what films are financed, what films are supported by festivals, what films get bought, what films get shown."

The distributor for "Passages," MUBI, stood by Sachs, rejecting the NC-17 designation and promising to put the movie into theaters uncut and unrated.

"An NC-17 rating suggests the film's depiction of sex is explicit or gratuitous, which it is not, and that mainstream audiences will be offended by this portrayal, which we believe is also false," MUBI stated.

"The MPA says its Classification and Rating Administration simply rates movies based on 'what happens on screen and how it is depicted,'" the AP relayed.

Watch the trailer for "Red, White & Blue" below.