September 10, 2002

Sex is Comedy
Rated NYR

You know, Catherine Breillat was feted a number of times last year as her film Fat Girl arrived as a pathetic disappointment after Romance, which many of us felt was quite daring and brilliant.  All the adulation seems to have gone right to Ms. Breillat’s already bulging ego.

In most Breillat movies, at least one woman ends up masturbating on screen.  In Sex Is Candy, her newest, Breillat herself manages to jerk off for 92 long minutes and never comes… she actually seems to fake herself into thinking she’s had an artistic orgasm.  But all she really gets is an emotional teenage girl who cries when the male actor in her deflowering scene does or does not – whichever way, he’s right there – penetrate her with his made-for-the-film fake erect penis. 

Brava, Catherine!

Imagine a movie about the last years of Orson Welles in which he hires Tom Cruise to play “Morson” and gives the actor line after line about how scary directing a movie is and how brave he is to move forward at all and just what a genius he really is.  Given that it would be Orson Welles, it would be horribly self-indulgent, but somewhere in the range of the almost acceptable.  But Ms. Breillat is no Orson Welles.  She’s barely Orson Bean. 

Of course, she commits the greatest sin of all in Sex Is Comedy… she bored me to jokes.  I mean, really, by the end her on-screen persona reminded me more of Pepe Le Pew than of a truly smart, feminist director.  And I kept thinking that although Anne Parillaud did a good job with the role, Breillat would have a better movie had she hired an actress who looks more like Breillat looks… nice looking, but unexceptional… and squeezed into her usually overtight jeans and tops.  Not that there’s anything wrong with a woman being built like a woman.  But Parillaud is rail thin and a true beauty.  When she sleeps with her 20something assistant, there’s nothing shocking about it.  She’s a hottie.  Yet Breillat’s whole point seems to be what a genius she is… which is lost.