A great first-date choice if you want to test drive a prospective partner’s degree of open-mindedness and sense of humour, this smutty-sweet Australian romcom posits five interconnected story strands about people with peculiar kinks. One woman (Bojana Novakovic), for instance, wants her boyfriend (played by the director, Josh Lawson) to help her enact her rape fantasy, a storyline that sounds dicey but proves surprisingly mirth-inducing. Another character can be aroused only by the sight of her partner crying, while a third has an “affair” with his sleeping wife whom he drugs every night, and so on. The best is kept for last: a deaf man (TJ Power) asks a sign-language operator (Erin James) to be his translator for dirty talk with a sex worker. The set-up is a bit like that old Woody Allen’s farce Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex crossed with Love Actually, though it’s better than either because there’s a disarming depth and poignancy here as well. And you have to give any film credit for doing a running gag about a convicted sex offender introducing himself to neighbours and pulling it off.
