It appears the rom-com renaissance is nigh. While streaming platforms have been doing the heavy lifting of keeping the genre afloat for the last few years, hosting hits like To All the Boys I Loved Before or Palm Springs and, more recently, I Want You Back or Moonshot, films such as Marry Me and The Lost City seem to be signalling their overdue box-office return. As a self-proclaimed rom-comnoisseur, this has not only allowed me to look toward the future of cinema with a newfound hopefulness, but retroactively assess rom coms of the past, especially those that have been overlooked.
One such example is Love, Sex, and Eating the Bones, a 2003 Canadian romantic comedy by Canadian director, Sudz Sutherland. Despite premiering at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival, this film has largely flown under the radar, not even afforded the courtesy of being relegated to the underbellies of any of the assorted streaming platforms’ algorithms. Even further, among the handfuls of people who have watched it, the film does not seem to be well-regarded, garnering a 57% on the Tomatometer with a 46% audience score.
Love, Sex, and Eating the Bones follows Michael (Hill Harper), an aspiring photographer and current security guard whose insatiable pornography addiction threatens his burgeoning romance with marketing researcher, Jasmine (Marlyne Barrett). There are many aspects of the film that I commend. For one, I find its overarching bawdiness, contradicting our current sexless film culture, rather refreshing. Additionally, Harper and Barrett have palpable chemistry and are both commendable actors in their own right, making their central couple one that is easy to root for. However, what I find most captivating about this film is its unapologetic representation of Black people and, more specifically, Black Caribbean people, in Toronto.
Toronto is somewhat of an enigmatic city. It is Canada’s most populous and, arguably, most influential, but is often absent from the conversation about major global metropolises. Adding insult to this injury, while often standing in for the likes of cities like New York or Chicago throughout the media, there are few occasions wherein Toronto gets to be itself. And even when the city does get to shed such a disguise, it still maintains a facade of overwhelming whiteness. A little over half of Toronto’s population consists of visible minorities, but the city’s depictions on-screen imply otherwise. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, for example, which is likely one of the most infamous depictions of the city, features an almost entirely white cast. While films like Turning Red are beginning to turn the tide, illuminating the fact of Toronto’s diversity, there are still few notable entries into the film canon that showcase its demographic reality. Love, Sex, and Eating the Bones, for all its crassness, makes visible what so many other films try to erase.
Love, Sex, and Eating the Bones is at its best when it relishes in that which is Black and West Indian. The title itself is a nod toward the action of sucking the marrow out of chicken bones, a common mealtime practice in Caribbean households, and an activity upon which Michael and Jasmine bond. Michael is the film’s outlier, the only Black character who does not appear to be of Caribbean descent. Jasmine, his love interest, is Haitian-Canadian, an identity that is intrinsic to her personhood — she attempts to teach Michael French throughout the movie (which incidentally is also one of Canada’s national languages) and breaks out into Haitian Creole when she is angry. One of Michael’s friends, Sweets (Mark Taylor), is characterized by his thick non-descript West Indian accent. The sounds of incessant teeth-sucking run concurrent to the film’s frequent dancehall needle drops, rendering the likes of Beanie Man and Dawn Penn ambient. The Caribbean current that runs throughout the movie manages to simultaneously be unignorable and seamless, a poignant representation when considering the extent to which Caribbean culture affects Torontonian culture and the diversity with which this city otherwise operates.
There is a certain tightrope that Sutherland walks with this movie that I find to be quite admirable. Endless discourse has swirled around Black films in recent years, especially as it pertains to Black representation in films. While this is a fraught issue that I will not even attempt to do justice in this article, there are two specific critiques that I believe topical here, namely, the criticism of exorbitant depictions of Black trauma and Black media that seems to subsist upon a desire to teach non-Black people about Black culture. Love, Sex, and Eating the Bones is so interesting to me because it is a film that successfully forgoes both.
Of course, the film contains flitters of interpersonal anti-Blackness, there are moments when Jasmine finds herself explaining certain West Indian cultural intricacies to the non-West Indian Michael, and there are often moments when Caribbean cultural flourishes constitute its laughs — Sweet’s accent, and the subsequent flavour with which he says words, for instance, is what causes him to occupy the space of comic relief. However, Sutherland, himself of Jamaican heritage, situates his film from a distinctly human angle that allows its comedy to land without rendering anybody a laughing stock. When discussing the representation of Black people, many define effective representation as that which is non-stereotypical, a notion that I have always disagreed with and that Sutherland aptly disproves. Peaches, Jasmine’s cousin, for instance, very much adheres to what we know as the Angry Black Woman stereotype — she is cantankerous and boisterous, her face contorted into a seemingly perpetual scowl. But, Peaches is hardly a caricature — in fact, these supposedly negative attributes are what allows her to be so fiercely loving of Jasmine, and act as a source of counsel and comfort for her throughout the film. Sutherland’s care for his characters and the storyworld lie, not within a mode that is incessant upon an engagement in respectability politics or an insistence that Black and Caribbean people and culture are worthy, but upon a dedication to portraying his community as is. The camera that Sutherland puts forth acts as a lens through which to enter a world that already exists, as opposed to a moralistic mechanism for tutelage.
Herein lies the film’s appeal to me — while it is surely a film that any individual of any demographic could find themselves enjoying, it feels like a love letter to Caribbean culture, for Caribbean people. Within a film genre that seems to articulate that only white people are worthy of experiencing love in its lack of diversity, and taking place in a city that is often reimagined as predominantly white, Love, Sex, and Eating the Bones intervenes by focalizing a romance between two Black people, who exist in an unabashedly Black, Caribbean community.
