No Hard Feelings spoilers follow.
As soon as the first trailer for No Hard Feelings came out, there was one big recurring complaint across the internet: this is a total double standard, right?
"Imagine a film where a 34 year old man is hired to take the v-card of a 19 year old girl," reads one post in the Movies subreddit, and it's hardly the only one. "That film would never, ever, be made in 2023."
It's not an unreasonable complaint: it's pretty widely accepted that female-on-male sexual harassment isn't taken as seriously as the other way around, due to a variety of social expectations and beliefs.
The particular belief the trailer seemed to be operating under was that there's nothing more embarrassing than being a male virgin; the 32-year-old Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) would be doing Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) a favour by "making a man" out of him, if only he could just toughen up and stop resisting it.
It's clear early into No Hard Feelings, however, that the writers aren't going to follow that harmful narrative uncritically.
From the moment Percy's parents explain their reasoning to Maddie - claiming their son's going to be "eaten alive" in college if he doesn't get laid beforehand - it's obvious the movie's making fun of this whole mindset. His parents are neurotic idiots and this part of their personality only gets more pronounced.
Things get more blatant in the scene where Maddie prepares to approach Percy for the first time. The movie plays a horror-movie music cue as she walks into the animal shelter Percy volunteers at, drawing parallels to the early scenes in Terminator 3 where the T-X approaches each of its victims.
Although No Hard Feelings sure gets plenty of mileage out of making fun of Percy's own brand of Gen Z-specific awkwardness, it's clear throughout all of Maddie's attempts to court him that she's the main butt of the joke here, not him. She's creepy, overconfident, and almost completely unaware of how she's coming across to both Percy and the rest of those around her.
The audience is meant to sympathise with Maddie, but to do so at arm's length. Much like when when Scott Pilgrim spent the first third of his movie dating (and then cheating on) his high-school girlfriend Knives, No Hard Feelings doesn't want you to forget that its main character kind of sucks.
It gets even more blatant with the introduction of minor character Doug (Hasan Minhaj), a real-estate agent who apparently slept with two of his female teachers in high school, and ended up marrying one of them. (The other one's in jail.) The depraved nature of this situation is glossed over so casually that it's unmistakably satire.
You can still critique the movie for treating all of this with light-hearted humour, but at least the movie is undeniably self-aware. It knows how messed-up this all is, and it's not going to let its audience forget it.
Perhaps the smartest thing the movie does is make it clear that Percy's self-actualisation has nothing to do with getting laid.
Yes, Percy does have sex with Maddie - well, kind of - but the moment where he truly comes out of his shell is much earlier in the movie. It's when Maddie pressures him to play the piano at the restaurant, where he goes from singing awkwardly to singing his heart out in front of everyone, that serves as the catalyst for Percy's big character shift.
From this point on, Percy is the more assertive, confident guy his parents always wanted him to be, and he didn't need sex to become it. In the final act, No Hard Feelings shifts firmly away from the raunchy sex comedy the trailers implied, focusing on the now-platonic relationship between its two leads.
Instead of sex, their feelings towards each other culminate in a climactic scene where Maddie jumps on Percy's car and he drives through a beach, into the water. (Not before crashing into a flaming grill, of course, nearly killing both Maddie and a bunch of others.)
This is the moment where Maddie understands what Percy went through as she drove him across the train tracks earlier, and where Percy understands what it's like to have a person stubbornly cling to your car against all common sense.
This is their moment of intense, climactic intimacy that the movie's been building up to all along. It's not a sex scene like you'd get in a raunchy 2000s comedy, but it serves the same function.
In the scene afterward where they're just talking to each on the beach, the conversation between the two feels remarkably similar to so many post-coital scenes in romantic comedies; here, Maddie and Percy are relaxed, and they're finally able to talk to each other without any resentments or hidden motivations.
They've achieved the understanding you'd expect from the main couple at the end of this sort of movie, just without actually being a couple.
In the end, this is a movie about two strangers in completely different stages of their lives, pushed together for crude, immature reasons, who nevertheless manage to find achieve a genuine, mature friendship. Maddie helps Percy come out of his shell enough to enjoy college like his parents wanted him to; it's just that when it comes to all the impactful things she did for him, that one-second sex scene is very, very far down on the list.
No Hard Feelings is hardly the deepest or classiest movie coming out this summer, but when it comes to the problematic nature of its central premise, it's a lot kinder and more thoughtful than most of us would have guessed.
No Hard Feelings is out now in cinemas.