Below Her Mouth  ★★½

THE creative talent behind independent romantic drama Below Her Mouth (2016) had the best intentions for their film.

Certainly it has achieved strong, albeit limited, critical attention in its home country of Canada for being a provocative and realistic attempt to explore a passionate same-sex relationship.

But – and it’s a big but – the sex scenes tip the film into soft pornographic territory to the point where they detract from the film’s overall impact.

In 2014 French film Blue is the Warmest Colour started a wave of similarly themed relationship dramas.

While that film gained notoriety for its extended sex scenes, it also packed tremendous power in its depiction of the relationship outside the bedroom.

You could see and feel every emotion on the faces of the two women who fell desperately in and out of love.

The same isn’t true for Below Her Mouth’s Jasmine the fashion editor (played by Natalie Krill) and Dallas the roof tiler (Erika Linder).

While both performances, particularly Linder in her first feature film, are quite good, the first-time script by Stephanie Fabrizi is too cliched and fails to drive the drama to deeper places. The emotion is there to a degree but isn’t as gut-wrenching as it should be.

The pacing of the film is also a problem. At times the sub 90-minutes rocket along like the latest season of Game of Thrones with the characters going from a glance across the street to a sobbing embrace in seemingly hours.

It’s actually meant to be over a week I think, but the film doesn’t spend the same period of time within the centre of the relationship as it does the build-up and the end.

It was made by an all-female crew and filmed in Toronto which makes the locations appear fresh and different to the usual

Director April Mullen is a growing figure in independent film in Canada having been a director, producer and actor. While Below Her Mouth isn’t a strong film I suspect it will be her ticket to bigger budgets and better scripts.