BETTER THAN SEX
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Samuel Goldwyn/ Fireworks Pictures Director: Jonathan Teplitzky Writer: Jonathan Teplitzky Cast: David Wenham, Susie Porter, Kris McQuade Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 10/04/01
"Better Than Sex." Hmmmm. There's one of the more intriguing titles this year. "What's it about?" asked one member of the prospective audience 15 minutes before show time. "Fly fishing," replied the other, only half jokingly because as it turns out, that guy uses his rod in the chilly waters of the Atlantic, and when he throws a line he means that literally. "There's lots of good fish in the sea," he adds. I don't think we're risking much in the way of spoilers to say that what's better than sex in the mind of writer-director Jonathan Teplitzky is not "more sex" but "sex when you like (or love) the person with whom you're having it. Josh (David Wenham) and Cin (Susie Porter) look so much alike- -both blonde-haired and green-eyed, she just slightly shorter than he--that you know that when they have their one-night stand, the fun will be extended for another, and then another, and then, who knows where this will all end?
The movie is really a theater piece that would be more at home on, say, the off-Broadway stage if it were presented in New York or in a modest theater in Sydney, Australia, where the action is located. Josh, an Aussie who's a wildlife photographer stationed in London, takes some time off to go back to his native land where he meets Cindy, a dressmaker who has a capacious flat in a residential neighborhood of Australia's most sophisticated city; the sort of place in which the bathtub, toilet, bed and living room are all in one area. What Teplitzky is doing is not much different from what pop psychologists achieve in their books and what the great American playwright Eugene O'Neill attempted in his then experimental play, "Strange Interlude." He shows us what the characters are doing, what they're saying, and contrasts that with what they're thinking; but happily he does not overextend his welcome in that regard. He does throw in one other theatrical device, that of a Greek-style chorus. Taking a whole bunch of quick intermissions while the two attractive performers are, well, performing, Teplitzsky flashes to a series of men and women, Cindy's friends, and has them talk to one another on the phone-- mostly catty stuff, gossip, proving that people in their 20s and 30s nowadays are just as nosy and meddling as they were in my own time.
Photographer Garry Phillips begins his lensing on the morning after, in Cin's flat, as the young people tell the film audience how they met at a party the night before, how Cin almost let Josh get away before inviting him in for "coffee." They find that they have much in common and, happily, much that is different as we see in a few samples of nudity: some partial front for the women and full back images of the man. There isn't much to see in the neighborhood, or at least we're not about to spend much time visiting one of Sydney's more ordinary residential environs, so the couple spend the rest of the day in bed while off screen they continue to tell us what they're thinking. (In one cute situation, Cin is thinking that Josh shouldn't stop "oh don't stop" while Josh, as if aware of her thoughts, thinks of a recipe for cake--a technique which does not work as the cake falls.)
A cab driver (Kris McQuade), serves as Josh's protector, encouraging him in a way that is most unusual for hustling taxi drivers to get out of the vehicle and go back to Cin's flat, where the ride is bumpier but more fun.
While 20-somethings are more open than they were in my day and women more honest about their desires, the same youthful immaturity is at work as when Cin's best friend, Sam (Catherine McClements) makes her presence felt to see for herself what's going on with Cin and flirts openly with Josh in front of her pal. Here's a picture that will be (and has in fact been) enthusiastically received by the right demographics, the folks in their 20s and 30s, because the one-thing-on-the-mind mentality of these two is something that other young people can readily identify with. David Wenham is a particularly appealing guy, known more for his role in a TV series, "SeaChange" than in other indie movies like "Russian Doll." An American can easily leave the auditorium thinking about how nice it might be to live in Australia where nobody in foreign lands bothers you or even knows that downunder exists, prosperity abounds, and sex is honest and open.
Rated R. Running time: 81 minutes. (C) 2001 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
========== X-RAMR-ID: 29709 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 252833 X-RT-TitleID: 1110245 X-RT-SourceID: 570 X-RT-AuthorID: 1123
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews