Zack Mosley [Film Festival 12.07.12] comedy



Jordan (Jonas Chernick) is a spineless accountant. He's planning to propose to his long-time-best-friend-turned-girlfriend Rachel (Sarah Manninen), but she's bored with him in the bedroom. After a night of narcoleptic sex, she dumps him, leaving our nebbish hero to take their planned romantic vacation to Toronto solo. He turns to his lothario friend Dandak (Vik Sahay) to be his "sex Yoda," but it's not until he meets debt-ridden stripper with a heart of gold Julia (Emily Hampshire) that he actually learns to use the Force. They strike up a deal: Julia will platonically coach Jordan in all things freaky deaky if Jordan will sort out Julia's credit card debt. The initial goal is win demanding ice queen Rachel back, but as Jordan gets to know Julia and her culinary ambitions, things get complicated.

A movie like this could swing either way. The sex comedy is a fickle beast, and the membrane between entertaining and stupid is thin indeed. Despite a formulaic story (screenplay written by lead actor Jonas Chernick), My Awkward Sexual Adventure is mostly entertaining. The script doesn't go for the obvious jokes (forgive me for this huge parenthetical tangent, but earlier in the festival I saw fifteen minutes of The Movie Out Here, a film by the Kokanee brewery, which features a scene where a nursing mother on a plane obliviously sprays the lead in the face with breast milk multiple times, and a scene where a Chris Farley-sized gentleman has a heart attack while taking a shit and passes out on the lead's face), instead opting for a clinical vivisection of the various hang-ups and neuroses that might lead a 21st century male to be bad in bed.


It mostly works because of Chernick, who is convincing as this repressed dandelion of a man. But all of the actors are good, which leads me to believe that a lot of the character work was done on the page. Rachel, for instance, would typically be a heinous bitch in a more puerile and misogynistic sex comedy. But in My Awkward Sexual Adventure, she's an empathetic character who just happens to be bored to tears with her boyfriend. They're a mismatch, and the film makes no attempt to judge her for her waning enthusiasm. It's Jordan who comes off as the dick in the relationship, foisting his unrealistic expectations on others and failing to hold himself accountable for his own issues. At least until he goes through the standard character business of learning and changing, etc.

This is a typically Canadian production, it remains safely inoffensive even as Jordan pictures his mother at a rub-and-tug and performs cunnilingus on a cantaloupe. The character of Jordan, in all his limp-wristed, non-confrontational glory, is like a paean to the Canadian spirit. This is a better film than Young People Fucking, which might be the definition of “damning with faint praise”, but I'm not sure if it's even possible to dethrone Porky's as *the* Canadian sex comedy. It has that trademark TV lighting that so many of our homegrown productions have, that in-studio atmosphere. But it's funny, and not stupid, which seems like a notable accomplishment. The Toronto International Film Festival just voted My Awkward Sexual Adventure as one of Canada's Top Ten of 2012, where it sits awkwardly next to great films like Rebelle (review) and Stories We Tell. I'm not sure that I'd go that far, but I did have a good laugh.

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