Young People Fucking

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Always practice safe spoiling.

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If you happen to live in the sexy, sexy province of Ontario and keep up with the Canadian film scene, you’ve probably heard about Young People Fucking (YPF), which opened last weekend. It’s the film that nearly got the Canadian Film Tax Credit Program restructured into what artists and filmmakers suggest would be a little Minitrue.

A brief description of what happened is that YPF deals with a subject that some find offensive, so they formed a coalition to make sure the government would not give tax credits to filmmakers that happen to trod over the line of decency, and thus Bill C10 was born. Though the thought of the government regulating tax credits doesn’t seem too invasive, couched in the smaller print is an amendment that would allow the government to re-appropriate funds from films they had already given. This would certainly give precedent to get all kinds of money back from terrible films, new and old, that probably wouldn’t have been made if not for these tax credits. So, there were protests with angry movie stars and directors marching on parliament hill chanting anti-censorship and "shame on you for your conservative principles" slogans.

With the stage set, let’s talk about the movie. Starting with the title, which probably drew most of the ire because not only is it right in your face, there is no denying what this film will be about. It has the same sort of blunt honesty that Snakes on a Plane had.

After seeing the film, the title should have been “Young Sexy People Fucking: No Uggos Allowed!” which would have been apt because the people in this film are so attractive, any veiled attempt to be “real” is automatically cut down.

I felt that a juxtaposition had occurred between the reviews and the trailer. The reviews mostly stated that this was a frank dialog about sex but the trailer set the film up as a comedy of sorts. So, there was no telling what I was getting into, except that my current Canadian celebrity crush, Carly Pope, was one of the stars.

The film follows five couples through five stages of coitus and no matter what your hang up about sex the filmmaker has you covered. There’s the voyeur, the foot-fetishist, the all-too-willing-to-please girlfriend, the players (male and female), the boring-in-bed boyfriend, the innocent-but-closeted-dominatrix girlfriend, the maybe-maybe not exes, and the two friends who just need a lay.

For all the hubbub this film created, I would have thought that something would happen, but nothing really did. You could see the exact same thing if you took the complete series of Dawson’s Creek or some other angsty teen drama, stripped away everything that wasn’t about sex and spliced a story together. I was shocked.

The dialog wasn’t any more raunchy or vulgar than a Kevin Smith movie, pre-Jersey Girl, or a Tarantino flick and the sex was on par with American Pie, it even has an awkward pegging scene that rivals the infamous pie-sex scene. I wasn’t expecting porn, I was expecting something more. Perhaps C10 should have been about not giving money to films that aren’t commercially viable.

Regardless, this was an interesting look at how Canadian politics can quickly devolve over some silly movie about sex. If you have a chance, I would recommend as an academic exercise but if that isn’t your thing, this wasn’t a particularly interesting film.