Film
All’s Faire in Love
Published: October 28, 2011
Directed by Scott Marshall
Opens Oct. 28
So Christina Ricci plays Kate, an actress who strips off her business suit in the middle of a job interview—with three men— and instead flees to spend her summer working at the Renaissance Fair, where she meets Will (Owen Benjamin), a college quarterback who skipped all his classes and must now work the fair in order to please his history professor (Cedric the Entertainer) and get the passing grade he needs to play in the fall season. Think they’ll hook up or something?
There are no surprises in how this shakes out: They meet, they have cute, playful scenes where they swim in a lake together and run around the fair playing with the kids, they start falling for each other, and then they kiss, only for Kate to see him escaping into the trailer of another woman. She gets mad, he sings a song at the end-of-fair talent show, they kiss again, and all is well.
What is surprising is all the grossly inappropriate sex stuff. The lake swim? It ends with their clothes strewn all over the dock, post-sex-scene style, and Kate in her underwear, legs draped over Will’s naked chest. The other woman? She’s the queen’s daughter, Princess Jeanette (Sandra Taylor), and Will’s in her trailer because his role at the fair, the lowly “fetch boy,” includes being the princess’ “plaything” for the summer. He paints her toenails and brushes her hair while she fakes an orgasm and orders him to call her princess. And the song he sings? It includes lines like "I didn‘t do it with Jeanette, I just brushed her shitfaced hair" and the always lovely "I want to do it with you."
So while we could've maybe brushed this one off as a C-movie romcom but cute for the preteens who are into this kinda thing (you know, like, the love interests high-fiving after their first big kiss scene), we can‘t in good conscience let the kiddies see this one—if only to spare their parents the embarrassment of explaining why it‘s funny that a guy might give his girlfriend a "test tickle" (read it out loud) to see if she‘s ticklish.
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