Tepid between the sheets and not very funny
The Canadian comedy The End of Sex starts with an awkward truth: that a couple’s sex life can start out hot and, over time, turn cold.
The End of Sex (MA15+)
Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Telstra TV, YouTube, Fetch
★★½
The Canadian comedy The End of Sex starts with an awkward truth: that a couple’s sex life can start out hot and, over time, turn cold.
When Emma and Josh, married for a decade, discuss their tepid time between the sheets, he compares it with “that mango chicken stir fry you make’’.
She asks “how exactly?” and he continues, “I don’t love it but I eat it and I don’t make a fuss.’’ With a line like that it’s no wonder their bedroom is on the chilly side.
Emma (Emily Hampshire aka Stevie in Schitt’s Creek) and Josh (Jonas Chernick, who wrote the script) love each other and decide to do something about it. After all, as Cole Porter wrote in Let’s Do It, “even lazy jellyfish do it”. Emma is an art teacher and Josh works in advertising. They’re smarter than jellyfish. They can work it out.
The opportunity arises when their two pre-teen daughters head to school camp. They have the house to themselves for seven days. As Emma says, they can have sex with the door open. This is Plan A and it fizzles. They decide more imagination is needed. “Let’s surprise each other,’’ Emma says.
So it’s Plan B, a threesome, Plan C, a sex club and onwards and, with any luck for Josh, upwards from there.
There are potential stand-in lovers, including an art gallery owner (Gray Powell, who steals scenes) and Josh’s millennial colleague Kelly (Lily Gao).
These supporting characters open the door on some interesting ideas about unrequited love but regrettably it doesn’t stay open for long.
This 87-minute film is directed by Sean Garrity, whose CV includes My Awkward Sexual Adventure (2012), also written by and starring Chernick.
The challenge he and Chernick face is to sustain interest in a plot that only works if the sexual escapades keep failing. If Emma and Josh light each other’s fires 10 minutes in, the film ends, or becomes a different film.
This means the comedy matters and it’s here the film falls short. There are a few humorous moments, mainly from Powell’s say-what-he-thinks art gallery owner, but overall it resembles Emma and Josh’s sex life: unimaginative, unadventurous and a bit same same.
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Munch (R18+)
In cinemas as part of the Scandinavian Film Festival www.scandinavianfilmfestival.com
★★★½
It’s interesting to think of painters who are known primarily, or even solely, for one work of art. In Australia, “Jack the Dripper” Pollock is inseparable from Blue Poles. There’s Vincent van Gogh and the irises, Claude Monet and the waterlilies, Leonardo da Vinci and The Mona Lisa. Of course each of them painted a lot more.
So did the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). When he died he left behind 30,000 works of art. And yet he is known, first and evermore, for The Scream.
As the title Munch suggests, this unconventional, melancholic artist is the centre of a docudrama screening as part of the Saxo Scandinavian Film Festival.
“Art grows out of joy and sorrow,’’ he says at one point. He pauses and adds, “mostly sorrow.”
This 100-minute film is directed and co-written by Norwegian filmmaker Henrik M. Dahlsbakken. It is in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German and English, with English subtitles.
It focuses not on Munch’s 1893 painting Skrik (The Scream) but on four defining moments in his life. This is not a movie about paintings. It is about the man who painted them.
We do see some of the paintings, such as Melancholy, which he did around the same time as Skrik, and portraits of himself and the people in his life, but almost as background objects.
In 1885, 21-year-old Munch falls in love with a married woman, the writer Milly Thaulow.
In 1892, 29-year-old Munch has an exhibition in Berlin that flops.
In 1908-09, 45-year-old Munch is a patient in a nerve clinic in Copenhagen.
In wartime 1943, 80-year-old Munch worries his art will be stolen by the Nazis.
Munch is played by a different actor in each of the stories, which cross back and forth between each other. In chronological order they are Alfred Ekker Strande, Mattis Herman Nyquist, Ola G. Furuseth and Anne Krigsvoll (yes, the octogenarian Munch is played by a woman and it’s a wonderfully whimsical interpretation).
This is a slightly experimental film. The different actors means it is about different manifestations of the artist rather than a chronicle of his life from youth to old age.
The stories are filmed in different, contrasting ways. The Berlin one, shot in black and white, is set in contemporary Berlin. Munch has a mobile phone.
It’s a docudrama not a documentary, so the filmmakers take some liberties for dramatic effect. The result is a fascinating portrait of an artist’s mind, one that suggests melancholy and humour are a natural mix.
When Munch asks the head of the nerve clinic, “What is the diagnosis? Is the painter insane?”, the doctor mentions Goethe (German) and Kierkegaard (Danish). They, like his patient, are “burdened by the inescapable anxiety of the genius”.
The nurse puts it differently. “A few too many cognacs and cigars perhaps?” She reassures the painter he will feel right at home as the clinic is full of “artists and poets”.
There’s another comic interlude involving the Swedish writer August Strindberg. He one-ups his anti-social friend Munch because he hates everyone, including himself.
It’s in a Berlin nightclub toilet that we see the genesis of The Scream. Munch, rejected as “too simple” by the German arts authorities, hunches over, a bit like Basil Fawlty, in front of his conked out car, and screams.
As in the painting, it’s a scream we can see but not hear. It’s drowned out by the music throbbing in from the dance floor. In his diaries, Munch said he had the idea when he was walking along the road with two friends. Not quite as dramatic.
As someone with a late-blooming interest in visual art and the people who create it, this film fascinates me. I think there’s something for everyone in the Scandinavian Film Festival, which runs until August 2.
The headline films are Let the River Flow (Norway), Godland (Denmark-Iceland) and Fallen Leaves (Finland-Germany).
And it wouldn’t be a trip to Scandinavia without some Nordic noir, new and old, including the closing night film, Let the Right One In, the Swedish chiller that has been shocking audiences since 2008.