Sex Is Cinema
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Provocative as ever, Catherine Breillat has two tricky films in New York this week. “Anatomy of Hell” (now playing at the Angelika) is already notorious for its hardcore images of female privates, as well as its innovative use of a soiled hygiene product. Then there is “Sex Is Comedy,” a film whose notoriety results from the unsettling fact that it is actually funny. Lock up the children!
A slippery exercise in cinema-a-clef, “Sex Is Comedy” deconstructs the filming of two sex scenes from “Fat Girl,” Ms. Breillat’s astringent coming-of-age shocker from 2001. Anne Parillaud (best known as La Femme Nikita) stars as the pseudo-Breillat, a mercurial auteur with flashing eyes, striking black hair, and whiplash touch for a turn of a phrase. Cross a neurotic raven with a Sorbonne wit and mind the bon mots: “Fear of being obscene makes one obscene”; “Sex is what people do most and admire least”; “I dote on whatever mangles the landscape.”
We begin on a wintry shore, as pseudo-Breillat directs her nipple-y young principles to heavy pet in the cold sand. Roxane Mesquida plays herself playing herself as the actress playing the role of the eager virgin in “Fat Girl.” Imperious and self-contained, in that preternaturally French way, she carries this meta-performative vertigo lightly.
Crushing in on her, Gregoire Colin co-stars as the co-star, replacing the original actor from “Fat Girl.” A hunky, lug-headed egomaniac, he will spend the movie vying for his director’s attention and fumbling with a prosthetic member that won’t stay attached. The phallic prop comes into play in the difficult bedroom scene,around which the greater part of “Sex Is Comedy” is staged. Were the actor to shave the surrounding hair, the prop might stay put, but that would mess up the continuity.
Continuity is the theme of this film; continuity of attention, of control, of imagination; the continuity of power between a director and her stars when gearing up for fake sex. Good sex creates a continuity of intuition, it implies; good movie sex extends this throughout an entire cast and crew. And that makes for comedy.
Ms. Breillat (and pseudo-Breillat) is very sharp on the creative flow and potential obstacles between public, private, and imaginative spaces as they come together on the movie set. The signature scene finds the director sequestering herself and her hottie assistant director (Ashley Wanniger) behind closed doors in the bedroom set. Is she role-playing the script or role-playing seduction of the AD? What kind of “blocking” is going on here?
Ms. Parillaud gives a sparkling performance as the alternately skittish/ steely auteur. No one’s ever done the Champagne giggles better, or so deftly tossed off hilariously “casual” epigrams. Watch her size up the actor over lunch, as he improvises a bogus confessional.
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Speaking of bogus, “Anatomy of Hell” goes like this: A Woman (Amira Casar) goes to a gay disco and slits her wrists. When a concerned Man (Rocco Siffredi) intervenes and asks her why, she pulls a face and explains, “Because I’m a woman.” They go for a walk. Woman repays man with fellatio and a job offer. Come to my cliffside mansion and critique my naked flesh! “Watch me where I’m unwatchable.”
And so into the Sadean scenario they go, four murky nights of ludicrous linguistics and pornographic provocations. When all is said and done – so many silly things are said, so many nasty things are done – the Woman learns that the Man finds her a disgusting, vile chaos, and yet cannot resist the urge to violate her in various unseemly ways. Outside, the ocean is “roiling like a bitch in heat.” Cue the rolling of my eyes.
“Anatomy of Hell” is risible even before it lays on the corny religious symbolism. Ms. Breillat comes on blazing archetype – the Woman, the Man, the Pretentious French Art Film – but by stuffing her discourse in the mouth of a gay man, she undermines any universal point she’s trying to make.” Anatomy of Hell” could be read as a hilariously overwrought critique of gay male misogyny; that would be a worthy subject, one regrettably untouched by cinema, and far more subversive than anything to be found in this art-kitsch “Hell.”