How do you shoot an intimate sex scene? That's the question Breillat addresses here, in her frank and witty exploration of sexual role play and power, intimacy and artifice.
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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