Reportedly based on the problems the director faced when she was filming a sex scene for her last film, A Ma Soeur (Fat Girl), Sex is Comedy is a sporadically interesting, if ultimately rather pointless mediation on movies, celluloid sex and the sometimes combative nature of actors. Which means there's an awful lot of lengthy conversations on the nature of acting (interesting but dramatically leaden), which invariably leads the director to confront her two young leads in this film within a film. Anne Parillaud plays the much hassled director who is shooting a drama in which a graphic scene is deemed to be the emotional crux of the movie. Her two lead actors - Gregoire Colin, Roxane Mesquida - give fresh definition to word 'tempestuous' and their hot-headed relationship threatens to destroy what is already a very fraught situation.
Although Breillat successfully blurs the lines between fantasy and reality (which is greatly helped by the presence of Mesquida, one of the actresses from A Ma Soeur), Sex is Comedy doesn't really live up to its title. For a comedy there are precious few laughs here, unless, of course, you consider the leading man's obsession with his prosthetic penis to be the stuff of high mirth. It may have been more effective on the written page, but Breillat's unwavering support of her director becomes a little tiresome by the time the film has moved into its second hour. At that stage, all hope for real insight has disappeared and we're left with a fairly hefty, pretentious discourse, which should have been hilarious.
