PREVIEW: The Sessions (15)

Playing at The Cinema at Gloucester Guildhall this week is the Amercian indie drama The Sessions considered to be one of Sundance 2012's breakout hits. Based on the essay "On Seeing Sex Surrogates" by polio-suffering poet Mark O'Brien, the film stars Golden Globe winning John Hawkes (Winter's Bone) in the lead role alongside Academy Award-winning Helen Hunt (As Good As It Gets) as Cheryl-Choen Greene, the woman who would O'Brien's seemingly impossible and unthinkable dream a reality.

Confined to an iron lung after suffering from polio, 38-year old poet Mark O'Brien seeks the advice of his priest on how and if it is possible, given his age and condition, to loose his virginity in as a God-pleasing way possible. Seeking the advice and aid of a sex surrogate, the pair embark on a journey of self-discovery and ultimately the true meaning of love.

Too long we have seen many Hollywood comedies approach the notion of sex as taboo or as something reserved to a teenage right of passage with often crass crude end results. So it is therefore refreshing to see a film directed by Ben Lewin (a polio sufferer himself) as tender, funny, and touching as The Sessions which provides an acting showcase for its talented stars, especially Helen Hunt who was nomianted for a BAFTA and Academy Award, and evidently proves it's possible for Hollywood to produce a grown-up movie about sex.

"Hunt is a prodigy. No other actress could have brought such easeful transparency, such a glow of givingness, such heedlessness of glamour each time she strips naked."
Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

"Three days after viewing, the film's questioning generosity and sense of perspective will still be knocking around your head."
Paul Fairclough, Little White Lies

"It sends viewers out of the theater with a heightened sense of the physical and a real feeling for all the things that sex means in human life."
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

Check out the trailer below: