The first thing you’ll have to do in order to enjoy Young People Fucking is ignore the tawdriness suggested by the title.
It’s absolutely true that Martin Gero’s feature film debut is about people in their twenties—five sets of them, to be precise—engaging in sexual intercourse. But if you buy your ticket on the assumption that the film is pornographic, or even very lewd, you’ll be more than a little disappointed. As a comedy, YPF is as interested in the emotional baggage and hangups that accompany the old in-out. Maybe that’s how you can tell it’s a Canadian-made film—by the absence of unabashed hedonism in the various couplings depicted.
The film employs a novel structure, ideal for comparing and contrasting the experiences of its subjects, and perfectly suited to today’s short attention spans. Each couple—in one case, it’s a trio—is isolated in their own little scenario, confined to a bedroom and shown negotiating the hazards, pitfalls, and awkward convolutions that attend getting it on, particularly if you get to thinking too much about it.
Abby (Kristin Booth) and Andrew (Josh Dean) are a committed couple who are trying something different to lift themselves out of the premature sexual doldrums; Gord (Ennis Esmer) wants his sullen roommate Dave (Peter Oldring) to bone his girlfriend Inez (Natalie Lisinska) while he watches; Ken (Callum Blue) is the scheming Casanova who may or may not be having a crisis of conscience as he tries to have it off with his latest office conquest Jamie (Diora Baird); Matt (Aaron Abrams) and Kris (Carly Pope) are old friends resorting to one another so they don’t have to get stuck in another doomed relationship; and Mia (Sonja Bennett) and Eric (Josh Cooke) are an ex-couple looking for a quick fix while denying their lingering feelings for each other.
YPF further fragments its narrative into chapters, cross-cutting between sets of character through the approach, foreplay, the act, the interlude, the orgasm and the afterglow. The structure works well with the sitcom mise-en-scène Gero conjures out of his small budget, and with the punchy back-and-forth of the script he co-wrote with Abrams. There are plenty of opportunities to cut away from the latest absurdity that has cropped up in one bedroom and dive right into the funny business awaiting in the next. The cast is uniformly funny, but maybe a little bit too uniformly good-looking, gym-toned, and white-bread to seem entirely like real people.
To some extent, the fast-paced, telegenic quality of YPF works against it. Every location in the movie has the same over-illuminated look, as though each scene were taking place in adjacent fabulous, well-lit apartments, and the haste necessary to establish the characters and their
respective conflicts often seems forced. The fact that some of the scenarios—such as Gord impatiently stage-managing his fantasy while gnawing on a tube of cookie dough or the playfully abusive interplay between the old friends trying to treat each other like pieces of meat—upstage the less successfully realized parts tends to diminish the impact of the whole.
That said, for a movie intended as nothing more than a diverting bit of fluff, YPF strikes surprising chords in making light of the way men and women go about getting what they want. The title might proclaim that the movie is about young people fucking, but the intertwining stories touch on the characters’ need for connection, their fear of vulnerability, contrary to one character’s statement that “sometimes a fuck is just a fuck.” That YPF achieves a certain depth without moralizing or selling out its comedic intentions is all to the good—and all too uncommon in Canadian movies.
