Of cantaloupes and Canadian sex
My Awkward Sexual
Adventure Starring: Jonas Chernick, Emily Hampshire, Sarah Manninen Directed by: Sean Garrity Running time: 98 minutes Parental guidance: Nudity, sex, coarse language, not suitable for children Playing at: Forum
The naughty Canadian comedy My Awkward Sexual Adventure is the story of how a boring accountant from Winnipeg — a man so bad in bed that his girlfriend falls asleep before they finish — sets out to learn the secrets of making love from a Toronto stripper. This is in no way a metaphor for the Canadian condition.
For one thing, the accountant is far too unlikely in his halting ineptitude to be taken at all seriously. For another, the signature scene, of a man learning to perform cunnilingus on a sliced cantaloupe, takes My Awkward Sexual Adventure into cultural areas that “naughty Canadian comedy” barely begins to cover.
Jonas Chernick, who manages to be frantic and deadpan all at once, plays Jordan, the sincere but improbably fumbling thirtysomething who has been madly in love all his life with the alluring Rachel (Sarah Manninen). But she can’t take any more, and her list of his failings — bad breath, sloppy kisser, has no idea what to do with her breasts, calls sex “gentle time,” won’t consider a threesome — is a combination of familiar anxieties and unlikely shortcomings.
Like much of My Awkward Sexual Adventure, and indeed like Jordan himself, it’s not quite there.
The result is that Jordan goes off by himself to Toronto, where his friend, Dandak (Vik Sahay), tries to inaugurate him into the world of grown-up male sexual expertise, such as the geography of the clitoris.
But Jordan is hopeless until he drunkenly falls into the clutches of Julia (Emily Hampshire), a stripper and gourmet cook.
Together they strike a deal: He will use his accounting skills to straighten out her messy financial affairs and she will become his “sex Yoda,” a platonic instructor in all things explicit, nasty, forbidden and kinky.
The screenplay, which was written by Chernick, is divided into several sections of instruction (“Dirty Talk” or
Jordan is hopeless until he falls into the clutches of Julia, a stripper and gourmet cook.
“Being the Aggressor”) that find humour in Jordan’s fumbling attempts to become a good lover. His endless devotion to Rachel becomes trying after a while, but by now, we have switched our allegiances to Julia, who — in Hampshire’s brassy performance — is believable, or at least as believable as a gourmet stripper can probably be.
Jordan, meanwhile, is stuck in scenes where he tries to control his passion by imagining he’s making love to his mother, or leading a gay and lesbian gathering while dressed as a transvestite (“I think I just got objectified”), and he seems increasingly less plausible.
Director Sean Garrity keeps the action moving but can’t rescue the movie from its tone of part earnest Canadiana, part unexpurgated vulgarity.
My Awkward Sexual Adventure concludes where we imagine it will, but a lot later. Like Jordan in the sack, this is one of those films that stumbles toward a climax, its various endings eroding away to reveal another behind it. It’s fairly likable, fitfully amusing and very filthy, but most of all it seems like a good idea that somehow got lost somewhere between Manitoba and Ontario.