Anne Wheeler is feeling decidedly done wrong these days.

Suddenly Naked, the romantic comedy she helmed starring Wendy Crewson, Joe Cobden and Peter Coyote, may have garnered six Genie noms, including best direction, but that doesn’t erase the tepid reviews that hampered it out of the gate upon general release.

The Globe and Mail wrote that Suddenly Naked was ‘uneven like an ocean wave on a windless day’, and eye Weekly, while praising Crewson for ‘a robust performance’, criticized the movie for ‘illogical plot developments and saccharine moments’.

Wheeler is still grinding her teeth.

‘I’m not sure what Canadian critics want from Canadian filmmakers. Sometimes you get the sense that you’re always supposed to put out groundbreaking and auteurish films. We thought it was just a great script, and a great vehicle for Crewson,’ she recounts.

Suddenly Naked casts Crewson, who also appeared in Wheeler’s Better Than Chocolate, as Jackie, a successful yet bitter 39-year-old novelist who sees the screen rights to her best novel land in the lap of a wannabe director.

Determined to get even, the impulsive Jackie seeks revenge on the scrappy director by penning a new novel designed to destroy him. But soon writer’s block intrudes, as does a brilliant and quirky 20-year-old writer, played by Cobden, who sweeps Jackie off her feet.

Suddenly Naked returns Wheeler to her first love, comedy. Beginning in the early 1970s, she performed comedy as an actor to put herself through university, and only later at the National Film Board did she start making documentaries and short films with serious-minded themes.

‘I suppose going from documentaries in the 1970s, and for most of the 1980s doing features that were dramatic, I always wanted to get back to comedy, but it was hard to finance comedy in Canada then,’ Wheeler recalls.

The filmmaker, now based in Vancouver, became typecast as carrying a torch for social issues after producing or directing Bye Bye Blues, a World War II story about a mother of two whose husband has been taken prisoner by the Japanese; the NFB docudrama A War Story, based on a diary kept in a Japanese POW camp; and the union-driven tale Mother Trucker: The Diana Kilmury Story.

Then, in 1997, the script for Better Than Chocolate landed on her desk, and Wheeler had to convince people that she had enough of a sense of humor to direct a romantic comedy about lesbian and Italian communities living cheek-by-jowl in Vancouver’s East Side.

Suddenly Naked has kept her in the chuckle genre, and she credits Crewson with much of the film’s success.

‘She’s the most wonderful actor to work with – high energy and positive and willing to try anything, and she throws in funny material for free,’ Wheeler says.

Suddenly Naked marked the first feature for Cobden, whose previous work was on TV.

‘You’ll see a lot of him,’ Wheeler predicts of the Halifax native.