Sex is Comedy (Catherine Breillat, 2002)
Dealing mainly with the shooting of one over-intellectualized sex scene, Breillat’s reflexive and satirical Sex is Comedy is a look at her handling of gender dynamics on set, as well as a reflection of her experiences with decency, pornography, nudity on screen, chauvinist actors, censorship (to a lesser extent) and the hardships of directing sex. Her on-screen alter-ego (Jeanne, interpreted by Anna Parillaud) spews laughably pseudo-philosophical direction to her terrible actors, either proving hilariously self-derisory or simply exhibiting French cinema’s grand airs of (faux?) intellectualism. If this is a genuine peek at Breillat’s working methods, it is simultaneously a very brave and elucidating one as well as a slightly worrying one, as it shows a director not quite in control, rather naive and in constant and unacknowledged search of her own methods and politics; something I believe is smartly illustrated in the film’s last scene, in which the “comedy” of the title fades almost entirely as the sex scene most of the film is concerned with evolves (or derails?) into something entirely unexpected.
