The Counselor was created by a team of really talented individuals. Directed by an Academy Award-nominated director. Written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who is a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Michael Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, and Brad Pitt appear in the mixed-company cast of movie stars and Oscar winners. You’d be excused for assuming that The Counselor isn’t the kind of film where someone has a encounter with a vehicle.

The film is both a thriller and a morality drama, with a lot of conversation and sophisticated, ultraviolent crime. After the turgid Prometheus, you might be pleased to see Ridley Scott return to expansive, Thelma & Louise-like Southwestern views.

Everyone has been talking about the all-star thriller, and one of the key talking points has been a scene in which Cameron Diaz is seen ‘having sex with a Ferrari.’

20th Century Fox

20th Century Fox

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Diaz is half cat, part alligator as Malkina. Her hair is uneven and two-toned, and her motivations are distorted as well. Reiner (Javier Bardem), her lover, is useless around her; he’s her pawn, and he’s both perplexed and terrified of her. Diaz has never played a role like Malkina — and there has never been a character like Malkina!

The following is how the sequence goes: Counsellor, played by Michael Fassbender, is having a talk with his new business colleague, filthy club owner Reiner (Javier Bardem).

“What is it you’d like to forget?” the Counsellor inquires, preparing to offer advice.

“I’d like to forget about Malkina f**king my car,” Reiner says, before going on to tell the story in a troubled voiceover as it unfolds on screen. Malkina, dressed in her distinctive animal print, climbs on Reiner’s Ferrari’s hood, removes her underpants, and ecstatically humps the windscreen while Reiner looks on in bewilderment.

“It was like one of those catfish things. One of those bottom feeders you see going up the side of the aquarium,” Reiner says, because McCarthy is nothing if not poetic.

Rolling Stone said: “Reiner recounts a long, descriptive story about how Malkina once f**ked his Ferrari. Then the film shows her doing it. ‘It was too gynecological to be sexy,’ says Reiner. I agree.”

The scene is intercut with Bardem trying to describe his feelings about the whole Cameron Diaz car-sex thing, as Fassbender watches in awe. This is how their conversation goes:

Fassbender: That’s crazy.

Bardem: It is, yeah. I don’t know. It’s crazy.

Fassbender: What do you think it means?

Bardem: Something. Everything. Nothing. I don’t know.

Fassbender: Car. Sex.

Bardem: Cameron Diaz.

McCarthy is a superb minimalist author whose spare, pitiless writing has been evocatively spun into cinematic gold time and time again, most notably in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and John Hillcoat’s The Road. While there is definitely more to this contentious scene than simple objectification, many critics have objected to its humiliating framing and sexist overtones.

That moment plays out as a comic anecdote delivered by Reiner, and it’s an amusing throwaway moment of sexual insecurities and confusion. It would have landed harder had Diaz (and her stunt double) not been placed in that demeaning position.”
– Gabe Toro, Indiewire

Entertainment Weekly said: “For all of her man-eating efforts in the film, Diaz is punished with one of the most wince-inducing scenes in years — a spread-eagle masturbation spectacle performed on the hood of Bardem’s yellow Ferrari that I’d say has to be seen to be believed. But I wouldn’t want to encourage anyone to cough up ten bucks to sit through it.”

“We were indeed aware of the Ferrari California’s presence in the film, a star among the stars of this talented cast,” Ferrari said in a statement.