The 2005 film written and directed by Sarah Watt, Look Both Ways, was a marvellous look at mortality and meaning, so I came to this year’s My Year Without Sex with high expectations. At first I experienced a minor letdown – this film contains far less high drama than the previous one (which isn’t suprising, given the train death at that film’s beginning). Once more, mortality is the issue. In an ordinary Melbourne suburb, in a typical, messy suburban house, we watch a hectic, lower middle-class family cope with a jarring event. Mother Natalie, played with wonderful empathy by Sacha Horler, collapses with an aneurysm and wakes up looking gruesome. Essentially we embark upon a close-up portrait of her convalescence, one that means being careful with sneezing and sex. Husband Ross, battered by the consequential financial and time squeeze, and bewildered by the emotional changes that beset him and Natalie, struggles to cope from the outset. In this role, Matt Day is superb, capturing perfectly the existential bind most of us find ourselves in. The two young children, wonderfully portrayed by Jonathan Segat and Portia Bradley, provide humour, sadness and context.
Watts’ direction is superb, smoothly sliding in and out of domestic scenes rendered fraught by Natalie’s struggle to recover. Watt prefaces each month of My Year Without Sex with animated mock-clumsy jokes around the title, an affectation that could have belied the film’s seriousness, but somehow even this device works as a kind of quirky directorial signature. As I said, my early reaction was muted, simply because there is no concession to the Hollywood ‘three-act journey,’ but by the close, I was hooked. Watts portrayal of real life was so real! I shed a tear or two.
Recommended without hesitation.