Sex With Love

VANCOUVER PREMIERE  │  Writer-director-actor Boris Quercia’s 2003 sex comedy became the biggest home-grown hit in the history of Chilean cinema and the most-watched Chilean film ever in Latin America. Desirous of introducing sex education to her fourth-grade students, teacher Luisa (Sigrid Alegría) invites their parents into the classroom for a meeting to discuss the matter. Many of the grown-ups, it transpires, have unresolved issues around sexuality themselves — Luisa prominent amongst them. She’s married to nice-guy artist Valentin (Francisco Pérez-Bannen), but carrying on, albeit guiltily, with author and self-proclaimed sex-expert Jorge (Patricio Contreras), the father of one of her students. In fact, nearly every adult in Quercia’s frolicsome film is cheating on somebody, or at least wants to — including Quercia himself, who, as butcher Emilio, unsatisfied husband of frigid Maca (María Izquierdo), goes gaga over his gorgeous young niece Susan (Javiera Díaz de Valdés), newly arrived from France. “The old comedy idea that sex and marriage don’t mix is carted out in a new package in Sex With Love . . . Just as Italians lapped up this kind of frisky farcical folderol in the ’60s, so Chileans have swooned to this facsimile” (Robert Koehler, Variety). Colour, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 108 mins.

Guest in attendance, December 13, 9:30pm.