Four Films That Tackle the Greatest Taboo

João Gabriel Vasconcellos and Rafael Cardoso in From Beginning to End.

Once homosexuality was the love that dared not speak its name, but with Ellen and Anderson on daytime and a dozen LGB (and occasionally T) characters on prime-time TV now, it's time to look at what might replace homosex in cinema's canon of taboo. Namely: consensual incest. With the recent release of the lesbian film Mary Marie, we look at four films that tackle incest and still made it to the screen.

Mary Marie (2012): With the ethereal quality of The Virgin Suicides, Mary Marie is a sweet and disarming, dreamlike film in which Mary (Alana Kearns-Green) and her sister Marie (Alexandra Roxo) live in an insular state of perpetual childhood and semi-incestuousness. After their mother dies, the two girls do everything together, including sleeping and bathing, but when a handyman enters their (now adult) lives, the twosome must confront childhood's end or deal with the possibly violent repercussions of a love triangle. The two stars wrote the film, which is lovely and hard to define but a worthy look at extreme codependence.