No Hard Feelings review: Jennifer Lawrence’s sparkling sex comedy has a beating heart

It’s the time of Lawrenaissance. Jennifer Lawrence, 32, seems to have put her blockbuster stint as a fixture in tentpole movies behind.

She’s been a key cog in the wheels of franchises like The Hunger Games and X-Men. Sure, she’s slid in a Silver Linings Playbook and a Don’t Look Up in her filmography, but with new films Causeway and No Hard Feelings, she seems to be ushering in an era of small slice-of-life films with a beating heart.

What’s No Hard Feelings about?

Maddie (Jennifer) is an Uber driver whose car is being seized by the local government of Montauk, New York in exchange of the unpaid property tax for a house she inherited from her dead mother. When a rich couple offers her a car for causing the sexual awakening of their reserved 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), she laps it up, only to gradually fall in love with him.

How is No Hard Feelings different from all the sex comedies out there?

Firstly, there are no steamy sex scenes. Despite that, No Hard Feelings is pretty much a sex comedy at heart since it involves ample humour that stems from the (in)ability of the leading couple to have sex together. Jennifer uses her ravishing appeal to lure the viewers in, but Percy’s reluctance to have intercourse with someone ‘without getting to know them’ makes for a fairly funny back-and-forth. And only Jennifer (Lawrence, and maybe Lopez, oh and even Garner) can switch seamlessly from irresistibly hot to hilariously clumsy.

Not just a sex comedy

The best part about No Hard Feelings is that it doesn’t limit itself to a ‘sex’ comedy. It turns that gaze inside and extends its purpose to an intense, meaningful romantic comedy. Both Maddie and Percy are flesh-and-blood characters with a shared reluctance to be anything more than where life has dumped them. They’re trying to get by, but never trying to get the best of what they deserve — until they meet each other that is.

It’s then that Maddie evolves from a sexually active woman with commitment issues and childhood trauma to an emotionally independent one who can distinguish between stability and stagnancy, and between monotony and lack of self-esteem. Similarly, Percy evolves from a sexually repressed young man to a sexually liberated one.

Relevance of the title

The title of Gene Stupnitsky’s sex comedy, No Hard Feelings, applies to both Maddie and Percy. Maddie ends up with feelings that are hard — solid and unmalleable instead of superficial and flaky. And Percy, well, gets enough hard-ons to allow him to look at life with a renewed lens.

Significance of cars

Interestingly, cars appear as a leitmotif in No Hard Feelings. They symbolize sexual freedom and lack of sexual dependence. Maddie is an Uber driver who rides the car herself but mostly in service of others. Percy is a reluctant driver and his sexual repression runs parallel to his driving inhibitions.

The first time they meet, she goads him into a mini-van and he feels like she’s keeping him hostage. There are two hilarious scenes of one of them perching on the bonet of the car the other one is driving. One curbs the other’s vision, only for the other to take a leap of faith on the wheel.

Car also represents ambition, as we see Maddie skate her way on a slope, with great difficulty, towards Percy’s parents’ car. And another where she is sitting in a limousine as Percy steps out and leaves. The ajar door of the luxury car shows how she has to choose between love and ambition.

No Hard Feelings, thus, invites us to take that car to a place we otherwise wouldn’t. It pushes the boundaries of what a sex comedy is conventionally supposed to be, and underlines what our sexual tendencies tell us about our emotional patterns.