One of the very first shots in Kissing On The Mouth is a close-up of a penis, as a condom is slid over it.

And now let me backtrack a bit.

The cinema has long offered us a representation of life somewhat removed from reality. As it should. However, we've reached a saturation point in some regards, particularly when speaking of 'mainstream' cinema, where life is not represented at all. Rather, we're offered a representation of a fantasy of life; reflecting on what these films have to offer serves not ourselves but, in a self-perpetuating style, the fantasies themselves - dreams, for example, of being rich, attractive, relatively happy and free to have risk-free sex with other rich, successful, relatively happy individuals.

This is fine and good, to an extent; I would never argue against the escapist merits of film. Nonetheless, mainstream cinema is so far removed from actual human experience that, in contrast to it, it has become exciting, moving and even revelatory to witness the mundane. Cassavetes understood this when he made his most famous films in the sixties and seventies; many directors still understand it today, and with the advent of digital video, the gap between reality and representation is potentially a great deal narrower - although many filmmakers still try to simulate the aesthetic qualities of film with DV.

Taking that into consideration, Kissing On The Mouth is practically defiant in its embrace of its own medium. It looks like digital video, and exploits the confines of the 4:3 frame, the limited color resolution, the so-called amateurishness of the format. It portrays what it ascertains to be reality in as honest a fashion as possible, and then sculpts our perception of it by means of juxtaposition. This is not necessarily a revolutionary technique, but where the makers of Kissing On The Mouth differentiate themselves is in their application of it.

This brings us back to the close-up of the penis and the condom, which is the first sexual image we see in a film full of them. There's a reason it's the first (just as there's a reason I described it in the first sentence of this review): it grabs viewers' attention, as sexual imagery always does; but it also subverts the expectations that usually accompany - and are fulfilled by - cinematic sex scenes. And this is not just because male genitalia is generally shied away - ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a sex scene in a film in which the characters used a condom? The reason you rarely see prophylactics is because it ruins the fantasy. Here, the filmmakers' intent is to demystify sex, to remove the fantasy, and they do this by juxtaposing blatantly graphic sex and nudity with blatantly mundane (or what is generally accepted as mundane) activity, such as painting one's house, or cutting one's hair, or driving. They blur the lines, too, with depictions of girls trimming their pubic hair or putting on deodorant after stepping out of the shower, exploiting and subverting the expectation that female nudity in films is generally supposed to be arousing, just as they've already done with the expectation that sex scenes are all about female nudity.

This isn't to say that they rob sex of its emotional importance; indeed, a great deal of the film is concerned with the benefits and fallout of intimacy. Emotion is a huge part of sexuality, the film couldn't claim honesty if it didn't address this; but what it does, and what other movies never do, is portray the other side of sex; the sloppy, boring, routine side; the part that makes it look rather funny to those not involved; the part that makes it clear that, despite what ever else may be involved, it is a human bodily function. As the filmmakers themselves have said, their reason for making this film was to "reclaim these images from pornography." When one considers that pornography, whatever merits it may have, has undermined our culture's appreciation and understanding of sexuality, the importance of this intent becomes immediately apparent. This is not an assault on intimacy, but an attempt to balance the scales of sexual representation.

The filmmakers I keep mentioning are: the director, Joe Swanberg, and his co-writers Kris Williams, Kate Winterich and Kevin Pittman, who all served as the sole crew for the film; the 'film by' credit at the end of the film lists them all equally. They also are its four lead actors, playing fictional characters who are probably not too different from themselves. Like them, the characters are all fresh out of college and trying to establish themselves as adults. In addition, the two couplings portrayed in the film are mirrored by the relationships of the cast/crew.

The loose plot concerns Ellen (Winterich) and Chris (Pittman), who dated in college, taking up with each other again - or, at least, starting to sleep together again. Does that mandate a relationship? Chris thinks so, Ellen is pretty sure it does not. Ellen discusses these sexual encounters with her best friend Laura (Williams), but does not tell her roommate Patrick (Swanberg). Patrick most likely has feelings for Ellen; he never says anything, but little things he does, like how he decides to cut his hair after Ellen casually suggests it's getting too long, suggests the esteem he holds her in. In compacting the plot into the paragraph above, I've made it even sound more like a traditional narrative than it really is; but rest assured, there's no happy ending in which Ellen realizes that the guy she really loves is right there at her side.

There are two wonderful extended sequences that illustrate the style of the film better than any. They both involve Winterich (who, out of the ensemble, could be considered the lead, and also gives the most extraordinary performance of the four). In one, she showers; shaves; dries herself; looks at herself in the mirror; not in a montage, and not in real time, but in a sequence of drawn out compositions that allow examination and reflection of her routine and its nuances. This is mirrored in a second sequence in which she takes a long drive from her apartment to her parent's house; no nudity this time, but the intent is exactly the same.

There is one major difference between these two scenes, however, and this is that the driving sequence has as its soundtrack not the natural sounds of a long drive but voice-over narration. This is an aspect of the film that doesn't completely work: the character Patrick is making an audio documentary about sexuality, and the interviews he records with anonymous participants plays over various sequences in the film. Specifically, this project has the practical purpose of providing some unconvincing drama between Patrick and Ellen. More generally, the audio-visual juxtaposition is used to create a wider perception of the characters and their issues, and it isn't exactly unsuccessful; but I wonder if it wouldn't have been better to let the audience's perception fill in the silence.

The best of these interviews has nothing to do with sex, but instead concerns feelings towards parents; in this case, the audio is far more interesting than the visual component, which almost feels like filler, and a really radical approach would have been to let this soundtrack run over one of the sex scenes; alas, no such luck.

There have been a rash of films featuring explicit sex over the past few years, but none of them have had the same intentions as this one (although Michael Winterbottom's soon-to-be-released Nine Songs may prove to). The sex in Larry Clark's films is meant to shock in an eye-opening fashion, just as the sex in a Catherine Breillat film is meant to shock in an ideological fashion; the oral sex scene in The Brown Bunny was meant to amplify the pain and loneliness of the characters; the sex and nudity of The Dreamers was a highly romantic view of teenaged libido - a metaphoric one at that. Many of these films are good (particularly the last two mentioned), and none are pornographic in their intent. But it's refreshing to see a film like this, which reveals sex for precisely what it is, makes no excuses and adheres to no fantasies. The sex in the films is relatively unflattering and appropriately graphic (there are no shots of penetration, but we do get an instance of ejaculation), and it is only erotic once - during a sustained shot of Ellen's face as she and Chris have sex. This eroticism is due not to the fact that she's having sex, or that she's naked, but that the clearly shifting expression on her face allows the audience to vicariously feel what she's feeling, think what she's thinking; it's erotic because she's palpable as a real person, and not as a body being objectified.