Navel Gazing

Sex is Comedy is a film by Catherine Breillat, which is a somewhat fictionalized account of her making a previous film.

In this film, the female director wants to film a crucial sex scene, that's particularly difficult. She sleeps with the male lead. The female lead isn't getting the scene right.

Next time you watch a film that has nudity, watch when it happens. Almost always, it's in the middle, or possibly early on. Rarely does it happen in the last 10-20 minutes of the film. Boogie Nights was famous for a scene where fallen porn star, Dirk Diggler, shows off the reason he had a career in porn movies. It's considered a pathetic display of a guy who used to have it all.

Sex is Comedy which is hardly a comedy breaks many of the conventions of films, placing a nude scene at the last parts of the film. It, like Boogie Nights, features a guy with a prosthetic, though in this case, the purpose is for him to maintain an erection.

Yeah, that's right. Indeed, perhaps the only way to have something resembling an "R" rated move with a guy that has an erection is for it to be a prosthetic and the guy to joke around about his prosthetic, er, penis.

But as silly as that is, this film, which had mixed reviews, really seems to expect a lot from its actors. What's harder to film? A sex scene? Or acting in a scene that's about acting in a sex scene?

All I can say is that the twenty or so minutes I watched the film, I thought that it was incredibly difficult to achieve this scene about a film scene, and how the actors really had to do a lot of work to pull off the scene. That, and how such a scene is rarely the climax (pardon the pun) of the film.