Love & Sex
by Lovell Mahan-Moutaw

This movie opens on the winning, love-struck face of a little girl...then it jumps to a slobbery boy who pokes his tongue at her and then shoves her, hard, again and again and again. Later, she stands behind a tree, furtively peeking around to the playground where she, in awe, watches the little bully.

He approaches her at the tree and instead of another shoving session, we are treated to young love. She tells him he could have shoved her less hard and then they kiss. Still later, she tells a friend about her new love, who then tells everyone in school, making the little bully a laughingstock. He cries to his girlfriend and ends it. She pleads with him not to go away..."You can hit me harder!" she yells at his departing back. Devastated, she stands, alone, rejected.

Ah, love.

What a nightmare.

Kate, our little girl, is now older, a writer at a woman’s magazine (not Better Homes and Gardens, but Monique, a magazine that tells women how to have better lives through relationships, good clothes and exercise regimens), and the graduate from, now fifteen, "relationships."

 Kate is about to be fired...her article on how to win and keep a man is rejected by her boss. Kate’s idea on how to win and keep a man is to explain to women how to give good blow jobs. Kate tells her boss, that she is good at giving blow jobs...not so good at keeping men. She begs for another chance and promises to deliver a feel-good, inspirational piece on how to develop a loving, long-lasting relationship.

Insert here: well-told, often-hilarious, sometimes devastating flashbacks of former lovers.

Insert here: Kate meets Adam.

Adam is an artist who paints very bizarre and disturbing paintings but is nonetheless an unusual and dynamic character who is both funny and endearing. He quickly wins Kate with his charisma and humor (regardless of the fact that he is almost unforgivably unkind to her date).

They fall in love.

Kate tells the story of her relationships and especially her relationship with Adam through constant flashback and voice-overs. But alas, this is Kate and she can’t manage to keep Adam in her life. Devastatingly for Kate and the audience, Adam breaks her heart and moves on to Peaches and then Savannah and then...

LOVE & SEX is a very sweet and funny movie about relationships. The story of Kate and Adam (played respectively by Famke Janssen and Jon Favreau) is familiar and precious. It is fun to watch it unfold and shocking to watch it fall apart. Janssen and Favreau are absolutely adorable together, loving and amusing and passionate. Favreau, especially, is a darling. Every girl’s dream guy except for the immaturity and, well, manly stupidity that makes him break her heart.

This film is little more than a tale of fifteen relationships (of which we are treated to flashbacks of only three or four but the specter of the others is constantly hovering). The simple concept of love and sex is told very well with the use of delightful and lovable characters. The audience learns to care about Kate from the first moment they see her, prepubescent and moony. Regardless of Adam’s eventual behavior in his and Kate’s relationship, and the ensuing cruelty, he nevertheless continues to charm throughout. I don’t know who to give the credit to for these wonderful characters, obviously writer-director Valerie Breiman, but mostly Janssen and Favreau, who are fabulous. They seem, as my movie-going partner Danae mentioned, to be having a great deal of fun. Danae noted that in their scenes together, they deliver their dialogue as if they are ad libbing. They are so comfortable together you forget you are watching a film and slip in to the idea that this is something really happening.

This movie doesn’t give us, nor does it try to give us, by the way, the answers to long-lasting relationships. It is simply a modern romance, a funny and sweet movie about love and sex and all of the great and horrible things they bring.

CineScene, 2000