Catherine Breillat's Sex is Comedy concerns a female film director, Jeanne (Anne Parillaud), who is attempting to film a sex scene in her new movie. Complicating the already emotionally difficult shoot is the fact that Jeanne and her lead actor (Grégoire Colin) are sexually involved. The scene being shot echoes with a scene in Breillat's previous film, Fat Girl, adding to the supposed "reality" of the situations presented in the film. Roxane Mesquida rounds out the cast as the actress playing
the 15-year-old in the scene being filmed. Sex Is Comedy was screened during the Director's Fortnight at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi
Takes an absurdist approach to a sophomoric subject and wrings real laughs from it; a terrific comedy about lust, filmmaking, and the human psyche at its most clandestine.
If you sometimes have the feeling French films are made by the most spoiled and self-involved upper-middle-class twits imaginable, it might be because of such films as Sex Is Comedy.
In Jeanne's world, and Breillat's, filmed sex is no ordinary eye candy. For their characters, it's an admission of a dark, complicated interior life that only the bravest of actors, finally, can expose on screen.
A movie about making a movie. The director in the film tries everything from cajoling to befriending to get a sex scene correctly played in her film. The last scene of this movie is the filming of that sex scene in the movie. I gotta say, it looks like they got it done right.But this movie seemed to take too long.
I'm sure they could have achieved the same reaction from her audience in a movie half as long as it was.
Disappointing work from French stalwart Breillat? Afraid so. Though highly interesting on paper, the execution of Sex Is Comedy falls well flat. The plot circles around (it might as well be a making of) A Ma Souer, her 2001 emotionally upsetting drama, regarding the difficulty of creating a sex scene between two
bickering actors. New names are adopted, but when the actress is re-used, there's no denying the AMS link.
The main concern here is that Catherine is normally in her element delving into psycho-sexuality, but for this project she seems a million miles away. It's not insightful, it's not funny (as the title might suggest), and feels like it could have easily been a 20-minute skit instead of a 90-minute picture.
All I really gleaned was that the actor used a prosthetic cock and that shooting sex scenes can sometimes be awkward. I never would have guessed that.
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