The Lovers Guide 3D Review

• 14th Feb 2011

In time for Valentine’s Day and a romantic night in you can’t go wrong with the re-release of The Lover’s Guide. Ladies, forget about trying to seduce your boyfriend by putting on a re-run of Sleepless in Seattle or the new release of Going The Distance. Instead put on and watch The Lover’s Guide together. It is not pornography dressed up as an adult educational film with cum shots and erect penises (well, it is as well), but instead a guide, or a reminder, on how to have better and more sensitive sex with your lover. It is unlikely you will learn anything new, but is well done with not too much in the way of cold hard science, anthropology and the likes of Kinsey are mentioned just the once. It begins by telling us that love is a drug that lights up the brain in the same way as cocaine and morphine and rightly promotes sex as central to a relationship and how oxotocine, also known as the ‘cuddle hormone’ is set off in the brain with the first flushes of love, otherwise known as being ‘love sick’. In that sense sex between lovers is central to a loving relationship.

The re-release is available on the DVD in both 2-D and 3-D and I have to say lying in your lover’s arms with nothing on but a pair of 3-D glasses can only induce laughter – not that there is anything wrong with that. But the 3-D itself doesn’t work as well as it does at the cinema, Shrek swinging from a chandelier was more effective using the 3-D cinema technology available today than the cum shots shown here on the less than adequate TV 3-D; this is despite the maker’s assignations that it is filmed in 3-D to the standards of 70mm film. Perhaps shown on the big screen it would work better. I soon gave up on the idea and reverted to the 2-D format and started again. The documentary is split into a series of chapters titled Flirt, Kiss, Lick, Penetration and so on. The intertitles are written in gold script on a purple background and it looks a little tacky and 80s. Nearly all the female models have fake boobs and hardly represent ‘normal’ couples, but at least they are for the most part attractive. None of the moustachioed men drawn in the 70s classic The Joy of Sex, here. Embarrassingly, towards the end it explains what happens if your man fails to ‘get it up’; the male performer here has probably had a tough time living that one down with friends!

The first Lover’s Guide was released with the backing of Virgin who at the time were also making Mate’s Condoms and much promotion was centred on how to put on condoms. It was made with the backing of the BBFC (British Board of Film Censors) in a post AIDS era, but this time round misses that out. The Lover’s Guide, is for people in relationships who do not necessarily need to use condoms. With this in mind the performers filmed are people in real relationships and the director’s aim is to portray the performers who have a genuine chemistry between each other and not the cold hard sex of a pornographic film.

Ultimately though it is a very sweet guide, narrated by Gemma Bissix and Jeremy Edwards, they supply an unobtrusive narration to the proceedings as does the music that permeates the film. Although a little new agey, the piano score aids the sensitivity of the love making on display throughout. It is made for the 21^st century and as the makers have stated, the sexual revolution.

The Lover’s Guide is just that. A sweet, sensitively made guide that should rightly replace the outdated The Joy of Sex as a guide for the 21^st century.

Chris Hick