W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
AUSTRALIAN CINEMA / DVD
MY YEAR WITHOUT SEX (2009)
Hibiscus Films / My Year
d. Sarah Watt; pr. Bridget Ikin; scr. Sarah Watt; ph. Graeme Wood; ed. Denise Haratzis; prod d. Simon McCutcheon; cast. Sarah Horler, Matt Day, Jonathan Segat, Portia Bradley, Maud Davey (96 mins)
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ORIGINAL POSTER ART
The Banal Glorification of Australian Family Values
My Year Without Sex is the second feature from Sarah Watt to delve into the emotional, ethical, moral and social circumstances facing middle Australian families, the underlying financial struggle bound to resonate with viewers in the current economic crisis.
Watt’s first film, Look Both Ways, signalled to the Australian filmmaking community her enthusiasm for the everyday issues – themes that in My Year Without Sex are brought well and truly to the fore. Although that may be an admirable intent – connecting with the so-called “silent majority” on their own terms (and Watt does indeed depict the concerns of middle Australia with a genuine empathy), the problems of middle Australia as depicted here are banal when not dealing with the ontological issues that mature adults inevitably face.
PREVIEW
Its problem is that director Watt – while passionate about ordinary Australia – delves so much on the emotional issues facing its married couple protagonists that its microcosm of middle-class Australia rather than making for any sociological analysis merely dissipates initial social criticism in a ceaselessly maudlin serio-comic observation of suburban banality. There is a reason many ordinary lives and issues do not receive cinematic treatment – although they are familiar, they are also often trivial and un-cinematic and this is the mistake My Year Without Sex makes: in seeking to celebrate the emotional issues of maturing middle Australia it instead elevates its mundane triviality.
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Australian Bourgeois Morality Spells Movie Mediocrity
This is a film whose visual design, central characterizations and narrative structure hinges on what might be termed “bourgeois morality”.
A married woman (Sacha Horler) has to have emergency brain surgery after a ruptured vessel. Told not to exert herself physically (including sexually) she swears of the pursuit of orgasm for a year as she adjusts to the changes in her life: she has noticed behavioural anomalies following the brain surgery – different behaviour, memory issues and new priorities involving a hitherto irrelevant religious faith. The film is divided into sections – each section bearing a sexually suggestive title – which chronicle her struggle with the awareness of mortality that a sudden medical emergency tends to imbue upon those connected.
EXTRACT
Middle Australia as seen through the eyes of a woman approaching soft middle age and reflecting back on her mortality: that provides the thread of connection through the observation of family interaction and suburban behaviourism that saturates this supposed comedy. The problem is that, as already inferred, the details of middle Australian life may strike a resonant chord of familiarity but cannot overcome a relentless, grinding triviality.
Only the subplot concerning Horler’s crisis of faith gives My Year Without Sex anything out of the ordinary to ruminate upon. But in that subplot is a most intriguing assessment of the role of theism as a belief sustaining the middle Australian ideal of “community”.
Following her brush with death, and her renunciation of sex (for a year), Horler befriends a woman Priest (Maud Davey). She appeals to Davey for some kind of religious validation, adopting theist conviction much to the chagrin of her long-suffering husband (Matt Day) who seems more perturbed by her move to religion than a year of enforced marital celibacy. Indeed, despite the film’s titillating sectional subtitles, it is resolutely chaste about human sexuality in its depiction of a year of celibacy. Indeed the characters accept a year of enforced celibacy without director Watt in any meaningful way exploring the consequences on their individual sexuality. Sexuality is wholly absent in characterization: this is a major failing in a movie about the effects of a year without sex.
Rather than address what happens to human sexuality within a marriage compact suddenly removed of a sexual dimension Watt concentrates on Horler’s gradual religious struggle. On that, however, the film is quite clever – building sympathy for Horler it initially warms to her embrace of Christianity but, in sly asides about Davey, gradually undercuts this embrace into a defiant assertion of the irrelevance of God and religion as a genuine solution for the problems facing middle Australia. On that note, the film does an excellent job – Horler’s mature, reflective and respectful refusal of religious authority is the film’s sole note of rebellion. Yet, also absent is any inquiry into the relationship between the theism of religious authority and the characters’ sexuality – the film ignores Church-based sexual / bevavioural socialization in favour of a rejection of theist principle, merely a first step in the re-examination of the Australian community.
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Vacilating Theism and the Middle Australian Crisis of Faith
Horler’s vacillating theism is paralleled to the year of celibacy – her resolution of the Theist issue also being the decision that ends her enforced celibacy. Watt suggests that it is the awareness of mortality and physical vulnerability that leads most Australians to turn to religion and theism for comfort. Watt’s triumph in My Year Without Sex is to expose theism as merely a carrion comfort of no lasting consequence for middle Australia as it lives out its daily life. However, although this separation of Christianity from a middle Australian identity is an intriguing reflection on an Australia so obsessed with notions of community definition, the film never criticizes the underlying morality of the Christian beliefs it finally undermines: it has no charge, no drive to question.
In the end, My Year Without Sex is intriguing for its clever treatise on the recourse to religious faith in middle Australia and although its reveals such faith as essentially a personal choice rather than an ideal to aspire to it is never truly subversive.
My Year Without Sex may criticize theist belief as unnecessary for a full life in one’s maturing middle years but never for once questions the moral and social values that attend the theist belief. As such it endorses bourgeois morality just as it separates it from theist lore – without criticizing the morality and socialization Christian theism offers Australia, and in so chaste a film as this about human sexual need within a year of enforced celibacy, My Year Without Sex trivializes what should be challenged and exposed.
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My Year Without Sex
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