Sex is Comedy movie review & film summary (2004)

This is the new film by Catherine Breillat, the French woman who often takes sex -- its mystery, its romance, its plumbing -- as her subject. Only a few weeks ago her "Anatomy of Hell" opened, showing a woman who pays a man to watch her, simply watch her, as she reveals her innermost physical and emotional secrets. Now here is another film about watching, this time curious about the director's personal and professional needs for sex, and how they differ.

The director, named Jeanne and played by Anne Parillaud ("La Femme Nikita"), is pretty clearly supposed to be Breillat herself. The film within the film seems inspired by her "Fat Girl" (2002), a brave and shocking movie about two sisters, one 15 and pretty, one 12 and pudgy, and the younger one's desire to follow her sister prematurely into the world of sexuality. The sex scenes in "Sex Is Comedy" are similar to scenes in "Fat Girl," and indeed the actress is Roxane Mesquida, who played the older sister in that film.

Breillat is making a film, then, about herself making an earlier film. Like other films about filmmaking, ranging from Truffaut's "Day for Night" to Tim Burton's "Ed Wood," it sees the director and the stars existing in a fever of their own, while the assistant director holds things together and the crew looks on dubiously. "It's always the same with her male leads," the sound man observes. "She picks them for their looks, then grows disillusioned." Known as The Actor (Gregoire Colin) and The Actress (Mesquida), the two stars indeed seem to hate each other, although Jeanne suspects, probably correctly, that they're exaggerating their feelings as a way of dodging the scene. It is cold on the beach, soon it will rain, their lips are blue, it is a ridiculous situation, and the director seems to doubt her own wisdom. The second sex scene is at least in bed, but here, too, authentic feeling seems to be lacking, and finally the director climbs into bed with her leading man to rehearse, while the crew stands by -- "for 26 minutes," observes the assistant director, whose job is to keep the production on schedule.

The bed scene is further complicated by the use of a large artificial phallus, which doubles (perhaps literally) for the actor's own. The actor walks around the set with the device bobbling out of his dressing gown, something Breillat thinks is funnier than it is; she should study the glow-in-the-dark condom scene from Blake Edwards' "Skin Deep" (1989).

The Actress is having difficulty "expressing herself" in the scene, which means that she doesn't seem to be faking an orgasm truthfully enough, and Jeanne shoots take after take as everyone's frustration grows. Finally there is a breakthrough, as the Actress experiences what may be hysteria but at least plays as sex, and Jeanne, obviously moved, hugs her afterward. It is not so much the actress who must be aroused, apparently, as the director. This is a theory I heard more than once from Russ Meyer, with whom who Breillat might have enjoyed shoptalk.