Sex is Comedy

Given Catherine Breillat's tendency to arouse controversy - from Une Vraie Jeune Fille and Tapage Nocturne through Romance and A Ma Souer!, Briellat's movies have gene... more >

Given Catherine Breillat's tendency to arouse controversy - from Une Vraie Jeune Fille and Tapage Nocturne through Romance and A Ma Souer!, Briellat's movies have generated heated debate, enduring all out bans and frequent censorship (the uncensored edition of A Ma Souer! is still unavailable in the UK) - Sex is Comedy comes as something of a disappointment.

The sex at the heart of the film is a sex scene at the heart of another film - purportedly A Ma Souer! Anne Parillaud (familiar to most from her role in Luc Besson's Nikita) is the Director (apparently a thinly veiled portrait of Breillat herself) struggling to reconcile a moody young actor (played with annoying insouciance by Gregoire Colin) and a pouting ill at ease actress (Roxanne Mesquida, fresh from her role in - yes, you've guessed it, A Ma Souer!) in time to shoot the pivotal scene in a movie about a young girl's deflowering (itself a favourite Breillat trope).

This is minor Breillat then. Eschewing the unflinching brilliance of her best work - Virgin (36 Fillettes), par example - in favour of the studied schematics on display in Parfait Amour, Sex is Comedy feels anecdotal, all but beside the point. There are better films about films - Tom DeCillo's Living in Oblivion springs to mind - and better films about sex films - Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights of course but also Bertrand Bonello's The Pornographer. Worse than this, however, the more farcical elements of the movie - those things that would seek to convince us that sex is indeed comedy (Gregoire Colin's clowning with the prosthetic cock, for instance) - are more annoying than amusing, leaving the viewer with a feeling akin to sleeping on the wet patch.
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DVD Extras

• Theatrical trailer
• cast & crew filmographies

Film Details

Cast

Grégoire Colin, Anne Parillaud

Technical Details