Young People F**king

Okay, so I wimped out by not putting the title of this movie in the title of this blog post. Don't know why. I'll probably get a gazillion hits for blogging about the movie, Young People Fucking, but not necessarily hits from people curious to learn what I thought about the movie, if you know what I mean.

For those of you in the US, you've probably not heard of this film, and probably you never will. I'm being presumptuous here, but if this film got a US distributor, I'd be really surprised.

On the other hand, many people in Canada have heard of it, even if they don't go to films, because it caused a "big political controversy".

The current federal government (conservative, very) is using this film as the literal poster child of a new bill put forward to keep the government from giving grants to films "of an offensive nature". I'm sure I've got the wording wrong, (and I'm too lazy to look up the actual details), but it's something vague and subjective like that. But the new Bill is horrible and totally about censorship and big filmmakers both Canadian and American have spoken out against it. Not sure where it stands (I am a bad person. I should find out.) but I hope it never gets through Parliament. Sad if it does.

Funny thing is this film is not that daring, save the title, which is, I'm sure, why the filmmakers chose the provocative title. It screened at the TIFF last fall and I gave it a miss then, but went to see it last week. It was okay. Basically five short stories that all take place on one night, over the course of a few hours. Five couples. The titles were: The Exes, The First Date, The Couple, The Roommates, The Friends. I think I remembered them all.

Yes, there was sex in each of the stories -- that's what it's about. But very little nudity or graphic depictions of the act. I've seen way more steamy stuff in Hollywood films, not to mention other Canadian or foreign films. I guess the stories were okay, but nothing really great. I like The Friends best. Maybe because it had a happy (if predictable) ending and the characters were most likable. The filmmaker was smart to end the film with the ending of that storyline, too.

Not sure I can recommend the film though. Unless you just want to tell people you saw a film called Young People Fucking, which, I'm realizing as I write this post, may well have been my subconscious reason for going. :-)