Some film festivals can be overly serious and pompous. Not South by Southwest the Austin-born arts and culture mecca that boasts an unbelievably stoked and rowdy audience that is game for comedies the ruder the better. This year my pick was a logline, ‘A 30-year-old Indian American virgin gets a job as a high school sex-education teacher. Doin’ It is not it though (2014 Haley Joel Osment comedy Sex Ed with a Different Culture is what it is). The idea is inventive but the execution is bad and somewhat misplaced, the character being depicted as a substitute teacher is a qualified celibacy advocate Lilly Singh. One would expect her to be perfectly suited for this position because she practices such a strict code of sexual restraint.
The film aspires to fight the stigma that surrounds any part of human sexuality which, at least some people would argue is a noble purpose and not without challenges. However, Doin’ It makes a mistake in this case as well and makes it almost too early when it starts with an inexcusable scene that probably no adolescent will ever get over Singh portrays Maya when she was still a teenager in the backstage of a school dance show, she is humiliated when her dance companion chooses this moment of all to remove his trousers. The curtain rises and the pants drop, the whole school gets the early drone of two.
Sat grimacing in the audience along with her Nani Usha Uppal, now granny Sonia Dhillon Tully, is also quite conservative. But while her X-rated shaming is most properly put as too graphic to explain in full, it’s fair to say the event was so slovenly that the camera lens required a cleanup afterward. Intended to be funny the disgrace is instead mostly repulsive more of a sex offense than comedy. A legend is made out of the occasion for the boy (played by Utkarsh Ambudkar later) while little Maya is bundled up and sent to India where nobody even thinks of giving her any talk about the birds and the bees.
Approximately 15 or so years later, Maya comes back to the U.S. full of ideals if not experience as one would expect in America. Now an entrepreneur with tech skills, she has a concept for an app ‘targeted’ to teenagers. To make sure she gets it right, she takes up work as a substitute teacher in Proudamore High School, so you know, how other app developers do research about their target audience. When the headmaster (Ana Gasteyer) learns of Maya and her ethnic look, she employs her immediately and puts her in charge of sex education. Barbara (Stephanie Beatriz), an overly flirtatious and recently divorced woman employed in the cafeteria, and Jim (voiced by David L. T1) are opinions. Barbara is arguably the funniest character in the movie. However, Sabrina Jalees, who plays Jess, the gay best friend, is certainly no slouch when it comes to the humorous components of the film.
Well, Maya may have no longer given up her body, but at least she is not the least qualified person for this task (for a start she is not making advances on her students and attempting to frighten them with STD stories). As if that were the case, instead of the joke being that Maya goes and talks about things she does not understand to people who are more experienced than she is in these topics, Doin’ It takes the humor to the least expected. Maya imagines herself to be the best sex ed teacher ever with the intention of quitting her virginity and delivering useful info to these kids with monstrous levels of hormones. The class features all the typical characters the all fags jock (Christian Martyn) the one promoting abstinence (Jessica Clement), the hot chick that wants everybody to be confused about her identity, and all that.
When all of her prescribed lessons fall through, Maya improvises with her out of the box and individual thoughts. She introduces the gender elephant concept (bringing forth ideas of gender socialization that are not possible in Florida). She shows graphic clips of the female orgasm. She assigns students self love for homework. She waits after class to explain to Abbey Ho (Sydney Topliffe) when a girl should give up her virginity. The answer from the school board: Not before marriage, This may be hard to achieve but Maya’s sex education does not appear to be realistic in the first place. Who does she think she is? Singh is at her funniest addressing the audience, but taking on a role is different for her and mostly about stylizing aspects of a feeling that Maya has learned to suppress.
Comedians draw from real life hence the presence of reality, but comedy also has an element of surprise. So it is, in some ways truly astonishing how much crazier the situations actually get in ‘Sex Ed’ than even the filmmakers Singh and director Sara Zandieh intended. There are some gags that must have sounded funny in theory, like Maya’s mom yelling Come! off-camera while her daughter uses a vibrator and some that are amusing without much build-up, such as what her mother does after discovering the device. At school, Maya develops a love interest towards coach Trevor Salter who is required to be equally well balanced and supportive in comparison to a rival teacher Mary Holland who is a blatant racist and constantly tries to put Maya down.
‘Doin’ It’ believes in promoting sex positivity but seems to get stuck with scatological humor associated with American Pie and early Farrelly brothers films. In one scene, Maya tells the class they did well and did not make fun of Abbey’s surname Ho. It acts as a microcosm of the fundamental dilemma of the movie Junior High Humor’s That’s So Funny non-joke mentality is pursued wittingly while its objectives seem aspirational. At the same time, the typical themes of an Indian American family’s restrictions have already been shown in different films. Once in a while, there appears a crude sexual comedic film that informs the audiences that there is still a lot that they do not know (John Waters always manages to and so does Pamela Adlon’s SXSW debuted ‘Babes’). ‘Doin’ It’ is simply put a long series of what one should avoid.
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