Not Coming to a Theater Near You
You know him?”
“Not socially. His name’s Jaws, he kills people.
Way back in the 9th grade, I made my one and only appearance on film: I was an extra in an amateur movie being made by a recent alum of my high school. He was the darling of the entire drama department, and his name was Martin Gero.
Fast forward ten years, to summer 2007, and the alumni gossip mill was churning at triple speed. Did I remember Martin Gero? Had I heard that he had a movie premiering at TIFF? And that (gasp) it had the F-word in the title? Emails were flying. Beyond the scandal of the title, though, none of us took the news very seriously. After all, how often does your high school’s token wannabe filmmaker – your local Dawson Leery, if you will – actually make a quality film?
Martin Gero has done just that. Young People Fucking isn’t revolutionary by any means (though of course a few censorious types think so), but it is a smart, tightly-paced, well-made sex comedy. The movie follows five separate couples as their stories unfold over the course of a single evening, and this approach lets Gero hit all the classic entanglements and conundrums of modern romance: the perils of co-ed friendship, ex sex, or the post-marriage rut. It’s American Pie meets Sex and the City, with a dash of When Harry Met Sally for good measure. It veers from the absurd to the sentimental, from crude to genuinely touching. Highbrow cinema it ain’t – but whether I was laughing or cringing, I don’t think I ever looked away.
The risk with a gimmicky, attention-grabbing title is that the movie won’t live up to its own self-created hype. In this case, the movie is exactly what it claims to be: young people fucking.
by Eva Holland | Source: 35mm Theatrical Print
24 Jun 2008 7:58 PM | Submit Comment
