SEX IS COMEDY
By Edwardo Jackson

Gregoire Colin with Roxane Mesquida in Sex is "Comedy"

THE REEL DEAL: Reviewz from the Street

BIASES: late 20s black male; frustrated screenwriter who favors action, comedy, and glossy, big budget movies over indie flicks, kiddie flicks, and weepy Merchant Ivory fare

MOVIE BIASES: None. Never heard of it.

MAJOR PLAYERS: None you've heard of - they're all French

Movies are warfare - plain, unadulterated power grabs between actors and directors. Despite their creatively symbiotic nature, actors hate directors and directors loathe actors. It's all psychological and sociological warfare of the likes that hasn't been as well captured on film as in Catherine Breillat's astonishingly honest, behind-the-scenes, semi-autobiographical account "Sex is Comedy."

When she's not cursing at them, flirting with them, or playing armchair psychiatrist to them, director Jeanne (Anne Parillaud) really hates actors. She hates them for the true emotion they hide, feeling that it's her duty to seduce from them honest, revealing performances. Her work has never been more cut out for her than in the current film she's shooting, a romance where her two leads absolutely despise each other. The Actor (Gregoire Colin) is a preening, immature, vainglorious schmo who battles the director on every minutia, just to hijack the production for his own chauvinistic, self-serving desires. The Actress (Roxane Mesquida) terrorizes the production in her own silent way, acquiescing to most of the director's commands but not socializing with The Actor or most of the crew in a way that would blossom her performance. With an emotionally graphic sex scene looming on the call sheet, Jeanne, wearing a foot cast for having broken it by "putting my foot down" to save the production, projects herself in a test of wills between her and the actors who would be portraying this intimate scene, vainly attempting to elicit a sincere performance that would approximate her vision of the scene - one that happened to her in real life.

I have never seen such an accurate portrayal of the politics of acting, specifically film acting at that, than I have in this film. It's almost breathtaking in its frankness, down to the incestuous, touchy feely nature while on set to the mini hierarchies of power within the crew. This is a brilliantly nuanced script that doesn't hesitate to dive into the social psychology behind it all; however, it suffers from tone issues as it vacillates pretty freely between comedy and drama. Choosing one over the other would have been an injustice to the complexity of human emotion, yet still those grand mood swings of tone (how seriously can you take a movie where there's an entire subplot involving the appearance of The Actor's prosthetic, um, stagehand?) distract if not confuse. Regardless, it nails the cold realities down superbly. Freezing while filming a "beach" scene, losing light, temperamental actors - yep it's a film shoot alright.

The cast is all fine including the sexually frustrated, almost-plaything of an assistant director Leo (Ashley Wanninger) to the halting flower, pseudo-ingenue persona of The Actress. The Actor is almost - enjoyably - in a movie all his own, a hurricane ofid that lashes out in the most moody, brooding ways. Too stupid to realize he's a beautiful, self-absorbed idiot and far too proud to ever give into the reservoir of emotion that lies beneath said idiocy, The Actor engages in a trifling, protracted skirmish with Jeanne for the performance that they both know is in him. It's clear that writer/director Breillat has more contempt for male actors (hell, she outright says it in the press kit). To her, when a woman directs, actors feel as if they need to compete for the soul of the scene. The act of giving into the truth of the emotion feels like a feminine act, Breillat posits, and our male dominated world fights that tooth and nail. Whenever Jeanne's attempts to conquer the psyche of The Actor, he still attempts to get his way by retreating into self-satisfied brooding and a throwaway "I am well paid." Actor Movie Hijacking 101.

Anne Parillaud (Jeanne) in a scene from SEX IS COMEDY directed by Catherine Breillat.

This movie isn't about sex, it's about power - the personal and projected power of Jeanne, a stand-in for Breillat herself. Much of this coming from Breillat's firsthand experience on one of her films, Jeanne is a nexus of the human contradiction of directing actors. Borrowing a page from the Bill Parcells school of leadership and coaching ("They have to hate me in order to act well"), Jeanne manipulates, cajoles, sucks up to, and outright bullies her actors to push them where she needs them to go. Jeanne is a virtual United Nations of movie negotiation; her excuse to get anything she wants in a shot is for "continuity" and her use of plausible deniability would make any White House staffer proud.  She has no qualms about pitting the two actors against each other, appealing to their competitiveness individually to extract their best work in a scene collectively. When not avoiding a duplicitous production manager, massaging the agendas of agents, or playing Dr. Ruth AND Dr. Phil to the horny Actor, Jeanne grapples with the kind of severe second-guessing/self-doubt that can only belong to a director watching her very personal movie spiral out of her immediate control.

"Sex is what people do most but admit to least," says Jeanne. This is one of several truisms that fly casually out her mouth ("I think we can only love the men we despise"; "Words are lies, bodies are truth"). Other not so casual truths exposed in this film are the technical, exacting nature of a love scene, the fragility of an actor's, nay, a person's self-confidence, as well as the barriers we erect between ourselves and our emotional truth. Despite a breathtaking, emotional climax of sorts, "Sex is Comedy's" emotional truth is dead-on, yet limiting due to the inherent narcissism of its subject.

No matter. For Catherine Breillat/Jeanne is right: "Emotion is never dirty or obscene. It's grace." If movies are warfare, then that sounds like something worth fighting for.

@@@ REELS(THREE REELS)
It's pretty hot - go give it a shot.

Sex is Comedy is rated "R." It is now playing in New York and opening soon in select cities.

Like what you read? Agree/disagree with The Reel Deal? Think he's talkin' out his...HUSH YO' MOUF! (I'm only talkin' about The Reel Deal!) Email him at ReelReviewz@aol.com!

Edwardo Jackson is the author of the novels EVER AFTER and NEVA HAFTA, (Villard/Random House), a writer for UrbanFilmPremiere.com, WriteMovies.com, and an LA-based screenwriter.