At the Toronto International Film Festival, a small sex comedy slipped into the lineup, catching people off guard. It was called Should we do that?And in it, a university student named Lily tries to lose his virginity with the help of internet tips, practiced personas, and a lot of forced confidence. The temptation quickly falls apart. All that remains is the two young people, groping, laughing, sharing their truth.
Film director Yuqi Sun is a comedy filmmaker and editor, whose job is to provide punchlines rather than to release a troublesome pause before them. Her film transforms the mere humiliation of intimacy into moments of humor, and they carry a smooth integrity that makes the audience laugh first and secondly recognize.
It should be noted that the Sun did not begin with a sex comedy. She first explored family dramas and comedies rooted in Asian family life. I’ll update, I’ll gaslight my motherand marriage. These shorts established her tone. It is humor based on emotional depth, looking at the tension between tradition and personality.
and Should we do that?she moved to a new territory. I think Lily, the film’s main character, sets the mood with candles and made stories, pretends to be her version, and likes Andy, the cute guy she meets at a party. Andy, a patient but amusing, plays with him. When the truth finally spilled, she has never done this before – he won’t let go. Instead, he acknowledges his own story of groping for the first time. The pressure will break. Comedy takes over. They laugh.
The setup may have become wider, but Sun doesn’t deal with cheap gags. She is interested in the ways people tried, failed, and happened to succeed. Timing issues – pause, every gaze – her background as an editor. The rhythm of the film lands somewhere between the cleringe and the release.
In her director’s statement, Sun admits that she will rethink her love and relationship. She describes the nights she spent scrolling through internet advice, the nights she has been inconsistently owned about how to text, how to act, and how to present herself. The comedy becomes her way of cutting through the messy noises we all know. She points out that she admits that she did the same thing, pointing out the absurdity of posing as something else just to win approval.
The film also delves into greater cultural pressures. Casual sex is complicated and treated as a symbol of freedom, but it is treated like a certain standard of modern adulthood. Virgins, on the other hand, become stigma and hidden. She is very clear about her experience under that pressure. Being an “old virgin” is the feeling that she has something to prove, or admitting her inexperience means that she doesn’t want her. What she claims through comedy is that the truth is never shamed. First time, what they are. Messy, nasty, sometimes funny. To hide that fact is simply added to the weight.
That philosophy advances to the end of the film. The act of seduction breaks apart, but at that moment it becomes reality. The two characters stripped of their performances connect honestly. The sun doesn’t make it romantic. She makes it interesting, and in the humor something warm comes into play.
Her influence is easy to spot. She talks about the early 2000s ROM-COMS and K-DRAMA shaping her sensibility. But where those films smooth out the awkwardness with their shiny cuts, the sun is leaning. She allows for an important silence seat and truly trusts the characters to stumble and the audience laughs with awareness.
What’s impressive is how consistent Sun’s voice has been, despite her core subject matter moving and changing. Whether she is looking into family themes and dynamics, or cultures about hook-up sex, she goes back to the same question. In her world, breakpoints are always the interesting part. Because that’s because people stop fakes and start to become human.
Should we do that? The comedy shows that there is no need to flatten intimacy to be anything. You can open it. It also presents the sun as part of a new wave of filmmakers who see humor as a tool rather than a distraction. For the sun, comedy is not clever. It’s about being human. That works.
Source: Our Culture – ourculturemag.com
