Sex Is Comedy

Director Catherine Breillat, like Gasper Noe, is well established as one of the new breed of French look-at-me, controversy-courting shock-meisters. Sex Is Comedy, though, sees a move away from the dark filmic attic of Romance and A Ma Soeur! towards humour. Well, not humour exactly. Unless you find some hilarity in the torturously difficult, shifting relationship between a film director (Nikita’s Anne Parrillaud) and her lead actor (Gregoire Colin) as they prepare to shoot a sex scene. So you’d have to be Swedish really. It’s ‘comedy of the human condition’ funny. As in, not very.

Sex Is Comedy is classic French fare, in that everyone speaks in a preposterously over-analytical manner, and could be said to look brooding. There’s lots of self-reflective stuff, with Parillaud clearly playing the director herself, dressed-up in Breillat’s trademark black jumpers, standing behind the camera looking as serious as cancer. And then to top it all off, there’s some obligatory super-intense (but simulated) art-house cinema sex, where everyone seems far too self-absorbed to actually enjoy getting fucked.

Of course, as a look behind the scenes of film-making, this is rather interesting, as it deals with everything involved with the process, right down to the very unsexy prosthetic penises. It’s also quite amusing in a ‘pretentious, moi?’ kind of way. However, it feels kind of insubstantial, as though we’re looking at a directorial doodle, rather than a fully-fledged film.

Watchable, if inessential then, but what a heinously misleading title. Sex Is Comedy? Not in this flick.