Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Young People Fucking

Cast : Aaron Abrams, Diora Baird, Sonja Benett, Callum Blue, Kristin Booth, Josh Cooke, Josh Dean, Enis Esmer, Natalie Lisinska, Peter Oldring, Carly Pope
Director : Martin Gero

Young People Fucking is quite clearly a title that's out to grab one's attention. Neither documentary nor hardcore, it's an ingeniously constructed pastiche of sexual encounters presented affectionately and with humour. the film should really be titled 'Young People Talking About Sex'. There's too much talk and not enough action in the balance and eventually it grows tiresome.


Still there's considerable mileage to be exploited from the title, some very funny scenes and an impressive young cast.
The film looks at five different relationships, its focus shifting between four different couples and one threesome. The relationships are identified as The First Date, The Friends, The Exes, The Couple and The Roommates and the chapters go from prelude to afterglow with intervening stops along the arc that include sex and orgasm. Each story evolves in a linear fashion but is randomly told in sections interspersed with the other four vignettes. The stories do not cross, and the characters do not interact, but are thematically linked.

The set ups are generally predictable, but the banter and interplay initially keeps the film lively and engaging. However, as each story proceeds, one can feel them laboring under the strain of trying to inject a novel twist.

The underlying sweetness in the movie's content is a mixed blessing. On the plus side, the cast is able to get across often profane dialogue as if it were lingua franca. But there's no real sense of tension or danger in the situations and something patently false about a film of this nature that displays no below the belt nudity for either gender.

Rating :

* * & 1/2

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