A Nice Girl Like You

A Nice Girl Like You

Despite the ease of acquiring sexual knowledge through a simple Google search these days, it’s possible for someone like Lucy (Lucy Hale) to not just be scared of investigating the matter, but even find it a little gross. In Chris and Nick Riedell’s romantic sex comedy “A Nice Girl Like You,” making love is something she can only bear with and talk herself through.

Occasionally she’ll remember something off her grocery list during sex much to the chagrin of her boyfriend, Jeff (Stephen Friedrich). They’ve somehow made it four years in this dissatisfying relationship; that ends when Lucy discovers Jeff has watched porn. Scandalized, she confronts him. He argues back that Lucy is “pornophobic.” She makes him choose between porn or her; he packs up and leaves, thereby accidentally setting off the type A, list making Lucy on a self discovery journey to explore the wide world of porn and sex.

There are few pleasures in “A Nice Girl Like You,” most notably being the relationship between Lucy and her friends. Distraught over the breakup, Lucy takes to work as a violinist and the counsel of her friends and quartet-mates, Priscilla (Mindy Cohn), Nessa (Jackie Cruz) and Paul (Adhir Kalyan), all of whom somehow contribute to her porn education.

But in other moments when they need her, she’s there for them too so it doesn’t feel like they exist solely to support her. Then there’s Grant (Leonidas Gulaptis), an impossibly charming guest at a wedding Lucy works who chats her up eagerly and doesn’t harbor around sex quite as much shame as she does. His presence may distract some from Lucy’s self-fulfillment journey but adds a fantasy element to the story he presents itself as someone for Lucy to work toward.

If “A Nice Girl Like You” would have stayed the course of the Ayn Carrillo Gailey 2007 memoir Pornology it’s based on, it might have been an interesting enough premise. But instead, Andrea Marcellus’ screen adaptation whitewashes the main character and moves the narrative into a more conventional territory one centered on love over lust, tame over risque.

Certain conversations around sex feel rather dated or muted in 2020, and more often than not, a lot of the movie’s humor hinges on finding sex inherently embarrassing. Lucy never reflects on why or how she might have picked up these negative attitudes toward sex; the movie never fully sheds her othering perspective on porn performers/strippers/sex workers. The way Lucy looks at them or talks about them keeps them at arm’s length.

Although the side roles bring a much-required perspective to Lucy, sometimes they become cliches themselves. Pricilla is a married woman tired with her sex life, Nessa is a Latina who’s really into sex and of course, Paul is a strip club regular because according to the movie, that’s what guys are into. The concept of sex in this movie is very rooted in heterosexual relationships and gender essentialism, and there’s next to no acknowledgement of queer relationships or even exploring that aspect of porn. In fact, most of Lucy’s list of porn and porn-adjacent things to try are mostly set-ups for surface-level jokes about visiting a sex shop for the first time or learning about sex toys.

Other jokes are so contrived they’re not funny but cringe worthy in the tradition of the Farrelly brothers, like when Lucy’s mortified by a sex toy at work or when she unknowingly puts an erection cream on her lips, swelling them up as if she’d been stung by bees. There are other bumps in “A Nice Girl Like You,” including its choppy start when the narrative bounces back and forth in Lucy’s story and briefly uses a voiceover to hear Lucy’s inner dialogue. Thankfully both affectations do not last past much longer than the first 15 minutes. The Riedells and cinematographer Nico Van den Berg also stumble by overlighting the movie and keeping its shots static, adding to the movie’s blandness.

And while I have “A Nice Girl Like You” to thank for giving me the line, “I thought you were evolved. We met at a film festival, for God’s sake!”, it leaves much to be desired. There’s a sharp movie to be made about getting over an aversion to sex but this one plays it relatively safe. It sticks to very conventional marks after all, the liberation of Lucy only leads her back to the safe confines of a monogamous straight relationship and not much reflection of what she’s actually learned or embraced from her porn quest. Since there are different strokes for different folks, I hope this sex rom com can be someone else’s cup of tea even though it wasn’t for me.

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