Andrew (Josh Dean) overcomes his erotic angst in the controversial Canadian film Young People F---ing. (Steve Wilkie/Maple Pictures)Naming is hard — just ask any bummed parent confronted by a sea of Ellas on the first day of kindergarten. But writer-director Martin Gero clearly has the knack. Titling his first film Young People F---ing bought instant buzz for the anti-romantic comedy — one that turns out to be a pretty traditional, solid romantic comedy after all (sweaty, clawed backs aside). The film opened the Canada First! program at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, leading to good critical notices and nervous euphemisms in the press.

Then, in March, a five-year-old federal bill called C-10 gave Young People F---ing its second life. The bill, written by the Liberal government, would allow the Heritage Minister to deny tax credits to any movie deemed offensive and “contrary to public policy.” The Conservatives pushed the draft legislation through the House of Commons and it now sits before the Senate. In this country, “no tax credits” generally mean “no movies,” so the bill is perceived as a potential blow to the domestic film industry. Canadian mediarati like Paul Gross and Sarah Polley testified against it at a Senate banking committee, and David Cronenberg told CBC News, “It sounds like something they do in Beijing. You have a panel of people working behind closed doors who are not monitored and they form their own layer of censorship.”

During Senate hearings, Charles McVety of the Canada Family Action Coalition (CFAC), an evangelist who claims to have the ear of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, took the stage. McVety reportedly pointed his finger at the cuddly family film Breakfast with Scot, a movie about a gay hockey player and the effeminate kid he inherits, saying it attempts to “proselytize young people into homosexuality.” Please – that film is so chaste, so rigidly inoffensive, that it would be lucky to proselytize anyone into an air kiss somewhere in the vicinity of another person’s forehead.

The other film that got McVety’s panties in a twist was Young People F---ing. (If only Martin Gero had called it Ella! I myself am thinking of naming my hypothetical third child “Young People F---ing,” just to hear his name read in the Senate.) McVety has not seen the film, though a private viewing was arranged last month for any interested MPs. The only representative of the Conservative party who bothered to come was a 22-year-old staffer; and she was promptly fired for her curiosity.

If any politician who did show up was shocked into a spit-take by what they witnessed, please, allow me to guide you back to your cave. YPF – as it’s been dully rebranded by marketers – is actually a benign comedy of sexual manners so slick it looks like it could have been made in the U.S. Somehow, Gero managed to duck those badges of Canadian cinema – the psychological barrenness; the earnestness; the slooooowness – while shooting entirely in Canada. This means the actors are vaguely familiar from commercials, and you keep thinking: Oh, she’s in the Scarlett Johansson role; he’s almost as cute as Jude Law.

Roommates Gord (Ennis Esmer, left) and Dave (Peter Oldring) ponder a threesome with Inez (Natalie Lisinska) in Young People F---ing. (Steve Wilkie/Maple Pictures)Yes, there is f---ing, but only of a slightly more graphic nature than a really saucy episode of Friends. In fact, I thought often of Friends as I watched YPF, and I actually mean that as a sincere compliment. Somewhere in the middle of that show’s over-long tenure, it had a high-water-mark season as a briskly written fantasy about urban 20-something anxiety, portraying gorgeous people with easily resolved neuroses bantering in fabulous clothes. Ditto YPF, with a few less clothes: the film only rarely dives beneath its well-hewn shiny surface, but the surface is funny and crackling with wit. We do lots of things very well in Canadian film; pop commercial romance is not one of them. The most radical thing about Young People F---ing is not the sex or the title — it’s the mass appeal.

The film is about four white, straight couples, and one possible threesome, working through their various erotic angsts over the course of one evening, from Foreplay to Afterglow. (A little variety in race/sexual preference would have spiced things up nicely.) Kristin Booth and Josh Dean play a couple in the early stages of sexual stasis, co-habitants who are exceedingly sweet to one another outside bed and bored inside. A yuppie former couple (Sonja Bennett and Josh Cooke) play verbal footsie for an evening as they decide whether or not being broken up means no booty call. A pair of best friends (Aaron Abrams, who co-wrote the script, and Carly Pope) turn a rhetorical conversation about is-consequence-free-sex-possible? into an experiment in friends with benefits. A British player (Callum Blue) has a very minor crisis of conscience pursuing a hot bod (Diora Baird), who may have her own agenda. And two roommates (Peter Oldring and Ennis Esmer) that hate each other reconsider in order to facilitate a threesome with one roomie’s fiancée (Natalie Lisinska).

That’s a lot of plot, but Gero maintains control, skimming back and forth with butterfly ease. Much depends on chemistry, and those who don’t have it – the exes; the Alfie stud and conquest – hinder the film’s inherent breeziness. Better, and more fun, is the awkward threesome, and especially the young fuddy-duddies played by Booth and Dean. When these nerds let loose with a sex toy, it’s great farce, with high stakes: find the orgasm and save the relationship.

Eric (Josh Cooke) and Mia (Sonja Bennett) get to know each other better in Young People F---ing. (Steve Wilkie/Maple Pictures)All the characters begin emotionally off course, and their paths are righted, sometimes just a little, by the power of sex. For all the flipness of the title, the film dares to take sex seriously, to believe that it has the power to forge and erode the bridges that link people. Dave Eggers wrote a great essay called “Never F---ed Anyone,” in which he ruminated on the troubling currency of the f-word. Eggers loathes the term as a stand-in for sex (as an emphatic swear, he’s cool with it), believing that even the most zipless one-night stand is imbued with inescapable meaning, or we wouldn’t bother. He writes: “Unless you’re into God or aerobics or heavy drugs, sex is pretty much the best thing we’ve got going, the closest thing we’ve got to rapture, to an experience that could be called religious….”

From the confines of its sitcom structure, and with less certainty than Eggers, YPF ultimately takes the same reverential view of sex. This belief in sex as meaningful might – stay with me here – in fact leads right back to the common ground where McVety stands, if his interest is in preserving the sacredness of intimacy. (But then again, McVety’s interest may be self-promotion and the quashing of artistic expression. I’m just guessin’.)

Is YPF obscene? Is it immoral? Is it – oh, Canada – against the Criminal Code? Annette Gibbons, a representative from Heritage Canada, has said: “It’s our responsibility to ensure that public funds are not invested in certain types of material, such as hate propaganda, excessively violent material, or pornography.”

Well, YPF is none of these things, but those are shifting, amorphous distinctions. Many Canadian films, as it’s been oft noted, are dark, ribbed with irony and twisted sexual encounters: think of Kissed (the necrophilia movie), Leolo (the boy-cat masturbation movie) or anything by Cronenberg or Atom Egoyan. These films have built our film industry – which generates cash and jobs, if you need an economic argument — and are our lauded cultural exports.

If we start imposing a moral agenda on what’s made in Canada, then what do we do with what’s imported? Far more obscene than anything in YPF is the gratuitous violence of any number of bad American action films, or the torture porn of Saw, or the hollow shop-it-off ideals peddled to teenagers by a show like Gossip Girl. But I don’t want any of those works — or a minor, pleasant little comedy like YPF — censored in a back room by bureaucrats too righteous to accept a movie ticket to a film their cronies publicly condemn. We’ve been counting on the tastes and discretion of adults to guide our artistic consumption for years without the interference of elected officials. Why get in bed with this bad idea now?

Young People F---ing opens in select cities on June 13.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.