Better Than Sex? Nope! This new Aussie movie exhibits the best, and the worst of most Australian films. It looks terrific, our Australian light really does lend itself to film and our sunshine is used liberally here both inside and out. But where’s the script? Where’s some interesting thoughts?

Better than Sex is mostly an indoors film, as you would expect from most movies that include a lot of sex. But that interior is Cin’s (Susie Porter’ s) apartment, a sunlit, Sydney warehouse space where she and Josh (David Wenham) decide to have a one or two night sexual fling before he jets off to London.

Trouble is that’s about all that happens. Better Than Sex is essentially a two hander and in spite of a lot of frolicking there’s just not enough going on. The action is interspersed with to the camera asides from the principals and by a kind of commenting Greek Chorus by their friends.

But that’s still not enough. Thank goodness the film is pretty short. And thank David Hirschfelder for a beautifully persuasive and pervasive music score.

The film livens up only a few times and that’s only when a third character is introduced, be it Cin’s greedy female mate or the strange, knowing taxi driver played by Kris McQuade. It’s then that the script began to breath a little.

And then there was a moment when Cin and Josh were sharing a bath and Cin needed to breath a little more. Gills would have been handy. That was funny. But generally the sex was contrived, sweatless and very soon boring, except perhaps for those more sexually inquisitive than me.

And before you accuse me of being sex obsessed I will make the following claim. When there’s not much else other than artless humping, well the humping had better hump.

Reviewers have been comparing Better Than Sex with the recently Australian released French film A Pornographic Affair. A Pornographic Affair had a similar structure, almost no sex, had much less likeable characters and yet was more entertaining.

I think that had a lot to do with the French being far surer of themselves than the team who produced the Aussie version. Both films were about shallow people, but the French pair were older, more sophisticated and I would imagine much more likely to get hot and bothered.

2 Sweaty Flys