Written and directed by Jeremy LaLonde | 101 min | ▲▲▲△△

 

A light and charming sex comedy, one that’s a lot less raunchy than its title might suggest, while still being resolutely for grown-ups.

Cassie Cranston (Jewel Staite) was slut-shamed out of her small town as a teenager, but she got her revenge, becoming a famous big city sex columnist. When her mother (a Lauren Holly cameo) dies, she has to come back to her reviled hometown and face up to her high school boyfriend (Ennis Esmer) and her teen nemesis (Lauren Lee Smith), who are now married to each other, natch’.

But it turns out Cassie has a secret: She somehow managed to turn herself into Toronto’s Carrie Bradshaw while still being a virgin. There’s a lot about this comedy that’s incisive about small-minded politics, taking well-aimed swipes at our culture’s prudishness and baked-in hypocrisy around sex, but trying to get us to believe a magazine columnist could make a living writing about sex without ever having experienced it? That’s a little hard to swallow.

Fortunately, a game cast—including Katherine Isabelle, Jonas Chernick, and Christine Horne—help keep things playful. And if the movie goes to some predictable places in its romcom structure (you can pretty much call who’ll hook up with whom in the first 20 minutes) and never gets as nasty as it could, the affair as a whole gets pulled off with aplomb.