Relax... It's Just Sex

P.J. Castellaneta's film follows a closely bound group of friends in Los Angeles. They are in their thirties, gay, lesbian and straight, all at the same table. It moves at first like a comedy of relationships: infidelities, jealousies, who is with whom. Then one of the group is the victim of a hate motivated assault and the film turns somewhere else entirely, with the rest left to deal both with what happened and with the wish for revenge. That is also where its balance is strained, trying to hold comedy and trauma inside one narrative. It comes out of 1990s independent queer cinema and has Jennifer Tilly and Seymour Cassel in the cast. The detail is left alone here.