Sex, Lies, and Tough Women - The Whistler Film Festival Gets Worked Up About Everything From Awkward Carnal Romps to Feminist Struggles for Equality
By Craig Takeuchi
The Georgia Straight— November 29, 2012
As Salt-N-Pepa once put it: "Let's talk about sex, baby / Let's talk about you and me / Let's talk about all the good things / And the bad things that may be". In that regard, this year's Whistler Film Festival - which runs until Sunday, December 2 and includes a sex comedy; an intense, carnally charged drama; and documentaries about elderly prostitutes and women's issues - certainly gives audiences plenty to talk about.
Not to mention laughs. To say that Jordan, the repressed Winnipeg accountant in My Awkward Sexual Adventure, lacks sexual prowess is an understatement: he's stiff in all the wrong ways. After being dumped, Jordan (Jonas Chernick, who also wrote and produced the film) enlists the help of a Toronto stripper named Julia (Emily Hampshire) to teach him sexual techniques in exchange for helping her work through a fiscal mess.
By phone from Toronto, director Sean Garrity said that what began as a Jewish romcom morphed into a full-blown Cancon sexcom. Althought the film provides plenty to ogle (nudity, drag, S&M, a threesome, an outrageous fetish orgy, a cunnilingus scene... with fruit), it also zeroes in on something rarely the subject of films: male sexual repression.
What's more, although the financial story line (think of a male Gail Vaz-Oxlade of Til Debt Do Us Part giving Julia a budgetary makeover) gets understandably overshadowed, Garrity said he wanted to explore the parallels between the two.
"As a stripper, I think she's kind of adept at quantifying the satisfaction of emotional need and sexual desire and understanding how those things are traded and how much they cost, and Jordan does not have that sense of how that works. He's got a very different sense of debt that she actually doesn't really understand"
My Awkward Sexual Adventure has been compared to Hollywood sex comedies, but Garrity (whose film is up against another one of his works, the thriller Blood Pressure, in the WFF's Borsos Competition for Best Canadian Feature) thinks the film retains a distinct Canadian sensibility toward sex.
"I feel like in a lot of Canadian cinema... sex really works, in a way, to move stories forward and establish character, and the scenes are about more, because I think that we're more comfortable playing with it on the screen... I also feel like a sense of self-image is maybe different in this film than in American sex comedies... I think you would find very few Canadians who would say, 'I am amazing in the sack!' I think we think of ourselves as kind of awkward."
In fact, he noted that one editor counted the word "sorry" in the film 83 times - you can't get more Canadian than that, eh?
