Director: Josh Lawson
Starring: Bojana Novakovic, Josh Lawson, Lisa McCune, Kate Mulvany and Damon Herriman
Distributor: Entertainment One Films
Runtime: 96 mins. Reviewed in Sep 2014

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Rating notes: Strong sex scenes and coarse language

This is an unusual comedy about love, sex and human relationships. It presents various stories about the sex lives of a group of neighbours and friends, and attempts to tackle taboo subjects. Josh Lawson writes, directs, and stars in the film, and it is his first feature-length movie. It was shot in Sydney, and premiered at the 2014 Sydney Film Festival.

The film attempts to provide humourous glimpses of the sex life of people, who live in a single street in a neighbourhood in Sydney. Five couples have sexual problems or tensions that the film exposes, and the story is told in five parts. It provides narrative descriptions of the sexual activity of each of the couples across a range of sexual desires.

The title of the movie is an English translation of “La Petit Mort” which is French slang for “sexual orgasm”. The film focuses on the limits to which some people are willing to go to attain moments of sexual ecstasy.

The path to such moments can be routine, risky, unexpected, immorally motivated, urgent, premeditated, controlled, or erratic, and the film canvasses all of them. Lawson directs the movie to focus on the consequences that can result from sexual activity, and he does so by accentuating what he sees as the comic aspects of the situations which people create for themselves, or put themselves in. For example, a man decides to have an affair with his own wife without her knowing it, and a sex hot-line creates an awkward situation for a female call-centre operator trying to communicate with an over-sexed, deaf young man.

The movie begins with the Director of the film (Josh Lawson) playing Paul who is shocked when his girl friend Maeve (Bojana Novakovic) says she wants to be a victim of dangerous sex. With this kind of plot-line, the film plays with some dark themes.

There is a fine-line at times among a movie that attempts to arouse interest in sex, one that attempts to stimulate in its depiction of sexual activity, and one that tries to extract moving emotional moments from the scenes being depicted. It is relatively rare for a film to attempt all these things with consistent comic intent. Fetishes are openly shown or discussed in this movie, and some behaviours shown are impossible to defend without ignoring moral standards. Fetishistic practices, for example, are mostly immorally demeaning, and this movie shows a lot of them. The film shows a woman (Lisa McCune) engaging in fetishim, because she thinks she will experience intense sexual pleasure if she makes her husband cry, but her efforts to make him unhappy are comically inventive.

Humour would seem to have its definite limits, and this movie blithely steps over them. There are moments of genuine hilarity in a support worker being accidentally caught up in a phone-sex conversation and being confused by it, but there is genuine comic risk in dealing with rape, or attempted rape, which is the subject of the film’s opening scenes. It is possible that comic intent about rape might make a sharp point about the perpetrator, but generally comedies dealing with aspects of sexual assault – either in reality, or in fantasy – are fraught with risk. Also, trying to extract humour out of a husband who sexually engages with his wife after he has put her into a drugged sleep, as this film shows, takes the viewer to the edge, but the film turns itself cleverly around to make moving comment about a misunderstood human being. For each of the five couples, the movie has a human point to make, and amidst all the strategies calculated to ensure sexual enjoyment, there are touches of real sadness in the unhappiness that people create for themselves.

The film is daring and tries to be different. There are some significant messages underlying the sexual activity that the film shows, though they have most to do with male fantasy about sex and male views’ about female enjoyment of it. In forming relationships, we are told dramatically that there are always consequences to what we think we might want to do, and one needs to think carefully about the outcomes that can result from what we end up doing.

The film has a genuinely witty, larrikin flavour to it that is characteristically Australian. It is well scripted, acted and directed. Good comedy reliably breaks through its subject matter, but viewers should be warned that the film may offend.