Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
There are so many things that The Incredible Jessica James does right; it’s smart, funny, and surprisingly moving. Another thing it nails? The first sexual encounter with a new partner. When it comes to romantic comedies, we’re often presented with a glamorized, super-sexy montage of making out and skin-on-skin, but Jessica James does none of that. There’s a pretty basic buildup – one that involves Jessica (Jessica Williams) coercing Boone (Chris O’Dowd) into letting her come upstairs with him after they get carried away in kissing, and then there’s the scene itself.
Prior to this moment, Jessica and Boone have only hooked up once, on their first date, after he tells her he’s “also good at cunnilingus”. In the middle of the night, however, she bails, and when they finally start getting close again, they’ve only flirted with the idea of having sex. The day that leads up to this scene sees them on a pretty perfect day, involving injury-prone rollerskating and a picnic in the park – and then night falls. While Boone tries to tell her he wants to take things slow and doesn’t want to have sex that evening, it doesn’t take more than a brief make-out session to change his mind – and then they head upstairs. “We can always say good night in the morning, right?”
What easily could have been a foggy, overtly steamy sex scene is instead something that manages to capture everything rom-coms usually ignore. There’s a clumsy, uneven pace to all of it, a rare sweetness and self-consciousness that we rarely ever get to see on screen. It’s not in the cringey Girls way, either. There’s goofy dialogue obviously inserted to help fill the discomfort of silence (“We’re naked”, “Yes, we are so naked”), nervous laughter, the frank admission of what’s going through their minds. Boone has no shame in admitting he’s apprehensive, and they’re both patient with each other as they try to understand the other’s needs. These people aren’t imitating porn stars or trying to win each other over in some super-serious, wild sex competition; they’re just navigating the inherent awkwardness that comes with the first time you’re intimate with another person.
As any good storyteller knows, what you don’t see is often more powerful than what you do, so when Boone starts asking what she wants and disappears under the blankets, the sounds from the two of them are sexier than any full-frontal encounter that another flick might include. Evidently, once they do start to get comfortable with each other and ask what the other likes, it becomes just as hot (if not more so) than any of the other super romanticized, skin-filled, stylized sex scenes that film is generally saturated with. The lightness of it all – the lack of pressure or emotional intensity – is what makes it so wonderful. They’re just fumbling through it like the rest of us.
The Incredible Jessica James may not have set out to make one of the sweetest, sexiest encounters of the year thus far, but the film certainly delivers one. With sparky chemistry between its co-stars utilized to great effect, it’s no wonder their scenes are so electric – sex or not.
