Sex Is Comedy

The title is misleading. Everything about this film is misleading. Is life misleading? Probably. That's the point.

Making movies about making movies very seldom work, because the process is too slow and tedious. Usually, these kinds of pictures are about what's going on behind the camera, the infidelities, the rows, the crises of confidence.

Catherine Breillat is not wasting anyone's time with tittle tattle, or gossip. Her film centres around a female director, Jeanne (Anne Parillaud), and her two main actors (Gregoire Colin and Roxane Mesquida), as they prepare for a sex scene.

It sounds simple, with opportunities for comic relief and eroticism. It's far from simple, rarely comic and as erotic as toast. Instead, it becomes quite fascinating, as Jeanne juggles the mercurial emotions of her stars and herself. "Words are lies, bodies are truth," she says and yet she has written the script, which suddenly stops making sense.

The actor is difficult. He finds his co-star distant and cold. "She hates me. I'd kill her if I could." He tells Jeanne that he has never been more unhappy, working on a film. "You want total obedience, or you get destructive," he tells her. "I can't stand your bossiness; you're a tyrant." He refuses to take off his socks in the love scene.

Jeanne flirts, shouts, manipulates. Her skill at avoiding confrontation and yet standing firm to her convictions is admirable. She is only making a film, for heaven's sake, and yet imbues it with an intellectual rigour that far exceeds its import, which is why this is so much more than a movie about a movie.

"Speech is the best chastity belt," Jeanne says. She comes up with little gems like this. "You can't do a love scene on a soft bed." It's obvious when you think about it, but you don't think about it." If only girls were normal." Men, she thinks, are predictable. She's talking about sex now. It's the girls who are complicated, because they do things for different reasons, often at the same time. How is it possible to teach an actress to stretch her imagination that far?

Breillat is a director and a writer, like Jeanne. This is not necessarily autobiographical, but it is honest. It gives a better impression of what is required to be a filmmaker than Truffaut's Day For Night, or any of the others. Is it cruel on actors? Not really. They are used, certainly, but they are paid.

Perhaps because this is French, the dialogue is intelligent and insightful. There are no cheap gags, except for the fake penis jokes. Things like motivation is discussed seriously, when it comes to the actress's moves during the seduction scene. Would a male English director worry as much, as long as she was full frontal and wet lipped.

Breillat proved in Romance that she didn't believe in faking it. She proves it again here.