My Year Without Sex

by Annette Basile | May 27, 2009 13:26 | Edited May 27, 2009 13:28

“…bloody funny…”

This film arrives amid much muttering about Australian films being overly bleak and not overly entertaining. While My Year Without Sex tackles life and potential death issues head on, it is, put simply, bloody funny.

Natalie (Sacha Horler) and Ross (Matt Day) are a youngish suburban couple with two kids. Life has its ups and downs, but they're a happy clan until the unexpected and unthinkable happens - Natalie has emergency surgery for a brain aneurysm.

My Year Without Sex is about the frustrations of marriage, the longevity of love, the thrills and spills of bringing up kids, major illness, and how recovering from an aneurysm can play havoc with one's sex life - but it's laced with a humour that's universal. There are several unforgettable scenes (funny and otherwise), like when Natalie writes her children's birthday cards many years in advance, fearing that she won't be there for those future celebrations.

Writer/director Sarah Watt (Look Both Ways) finds the humour in life's pain, but she does it without diminishing or belittling her characters' experiences. She delivers a snappy, solid script, while Horler and Day (both fantastic) give us real, slightly frayed-at-the-edges characters. And the kids (Jonathan Segat's sensitive Louis and Portia Bradley's pleasantly precocious Ruby) are great (and bloody funny). Smaller roles are also well cast, including Maud Davey as the locale curate, who's here to allow godly debate (and great sounds from the church choir), while the film portrays multicultural Australia with rare unselfconsciousness.

Covering the course of one year, the story is presented in month-by-month chapters, which aid the brisk pace. By the time you arrive at the conclusion, the character development is tangible - there's a journey to be experienced here, for the characters and for us.