Sheffield Sex City: The Movie! A much better title for the otherwise pretty lousy The Principles Of Lust . Or perhaps highlighting the apparently most daring aspect of the film, they could have called it Teen Fight Club. What TPOL is all about is that hoary old cliche that to live life to the full one must constantly be transgressing norms, breaking rules, and betting on eleven year olds bare knuckle boxing. It presents such an unconvincing case that the entire audience wants to move in with the nice youth worker single mother character and her very funny child and forget those nasty narcissistic men ever existed. Well not the entire audience, two people walked out of the screening I went to see, and I can’t say I blame them. I think I only stayed because it was raining.
This plot is old of course, and suffers terribly from the audience knowing exactly where it is going to go. Actually the film does not even have the courage to follow that through, pardoning our merely misguided lead by making all of the bad elements act massively out of their (admittedly one dimensional and poor) characters. As anti-male a film as I have seen in a long time, the men are presented as idiotic idle wasters, while the women – from the youth worker to the prostitute doing a law degree are almost beatified. Sure if you want to see a grimy film, full of unconvincing, unpleasant characters having rubbish sex in the back rooms of grotty pubs, this is the film for you. But I can’t help but think that even Sex Lives Of The Potato Men is a more attractive option.