Sex Is Comedy (2002)

Catherine Breillat's Sex is Comedy concerns a female film director, Jeanne, 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 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.

It's particularly hard for a director to capture film-making without getting precious, inbred, over-dramatic, or all three. Breillat ably demonstrates the instinctive, lizard-brain methods of a female auteur in extracting from two "cattle" (as Hitchcock called actors) a love-scene of searing intimacy. Her main battle is with her leading man ("an actor is really a woman" she opines), although, naturally, it is the leading lady who will steal the show. I disagree that this is Breillat's first comedy. 'Romance' was at various points hilarious, but I accept that the French sense of humour can be elusive for foreigners; indeed, dozens of IMDb reviewers detected no comedy in Romance. By contrast, Sex Is Comedy raises plenty of laughs, mainly by using an actor's prop that goes back thousands of years to Plautus and the ancient Greeks. We wondered, leaving the theatre, whether Roxane's "beard" was a wig. A lovely performance from Anne Parillaud as Breillat wrestling with her own script, looking ten years younger than her age.

IMDB Reviewer