Comment je me suis disputé... (ma vie sexuelle)

It's fair to say that had I not found Rois et Reine so rich, complex and ultimately enjoyable I may not have taken the trouble (to say nothing of the three hours needed) to watch this earlier work by Arnaud Desplechin toplining the same two very fine actors (Manu Devos and Mathieu Almaric). The fact that this time around the duo were supported by the likes of Jeanne Balibar, Denis Podalydes, Marion Cotillard and Chiara Mastroianni merely sweetened the pot but it has to be said that Desplechin doesn't make it easy. Almaric plays a University lecturer named Paul Dedaulus, a name surely not chosen at random. Daedalus, in Greek mythology was the father of Icarus, who flew too near the sun, but apart from that Daedalus was on straight commission from King Minos of Crete for whom he created among other things, the maze and the Minotaur in the centre of it. I'm betting twelve to seven that Desplechin had that very same maze in mind when he dreamed up this labyrinthine storyline of a man who is constantly taking wrong turnings in his attempt to move forward in his life. As a vacillator this guy can leave Hamlet dead in the water; should he stay with Devos - with whom he has been in an on/off relationship for ten years - or should he attempt to make and/or get a firm commitment from one of the three other girls with whom he is involved. At the end of three hours your guess is as good as mine but it is also fair to say that along the way we have been treated to some very fine acting indeed though whether it has any point is moot. Those, like me, who enjoy watching French actors - without question some of the finest in the world - in their early careers will find this enthralling for that reason alone. Those will little or no interest in French actors, fine or otherwise, may well be bemused, bored or both.

French Realism is like any other Realism, but longer. The Realist film-maker shoots "real people" in "real life". Here, in this film, there are some guys and girls, and they meet, talk, drink, eat, sleep, make love, wake up, walk, stop walking, look at something, walk past a traffic sign, light a cigarette next to a car, etc., etc. Maybe if you were a native of an entirely different culture you might find all this interesting, but my recommendation is to avoid the film and go out with your friends instead. Maybe film your evening on video and send it to Despleschin so he can re-edit it as "Ma Vie Sexuelle 2." The film is well made and well acted, but my 93-year-old grandmother is slightly more interesting and a bit less predictable. Sad to say, but this kind of film seems to be increasingly what is imported from France; films by youngish film-makers who suffer from that terrible narcissism: that people like them are endlessly fascinating and worth 3 hours of a stranger's time. In most cases this is sadly not so: my friends are much more interesting, my life is more real, and my thoughts are more profound. Not intrinsically, but just because I live them, I don't read them off a screen.

don't get me wrong, the film had its moments. it had an interesting premise, and engaging characters who had a lot of memorable lines.

what it lacked was cohesion. it had waaayyyy too many sub-plots which i believe were not necessary for the film to make its point.

somebody should have taken a pair of scissors to it.

In my comments on "J'embrasse Pas", a film I much admire, I mentioned the decline of the French cinema in recent years. As an example to substantiate this, look no further than "Ma Vie Sexuelle", a work of gargantuan proportions (3 hours running time) that for me fails to transcend the commonplace it seems to be celebrating and becomes trapped in inertia. On the surface much of it is not unlike a Rohmer film. There is a group of young people living in Paris. Paul, the central character is a University tutor. There are at least three young woman in his life and he moves from one to another indecisively. There are endless scenes in cafes, in one anothers' apartments and at parties; the very stuff of Rohmer. The Master, however, would have made it last half the time with several times the degree of perception. "Ma Vie Sexuelle", on the other hand, has a curious lack of purpose, often losing its sense of directional balance. What to make of the two flashbacks to Paul's childhood that seem to add nothing to our knowledge of his character? And then there is the strange figure of Rabier, a senior lecturer whose return to the University seems to fill Paul with unease over his inadequacy to cope with professional life. Presumably he is intended to play a pivotal role like one of Iris Murdoch's "enchanters". But how can he when he is depicted as a quirky idiot who goes everywhere with a pet monkey? The sudden change of mood to black comedy when the monkey becomes trapped behind a radiator is curiously at variance with the rest of the film. There is a background score that, with its suggestion of unease, would fit better in a Chabrol thriller than these mundane goings-on. To add to all the muddled pretentiousness there is a voice-over narrative so beloved by earlier French masters such as Resnais and Truffaut but here there is nothing perceptive in what is said. It simply supplies the connections that the Taiwanese masters, Hou Xiaoxian and Edward Yang, would have demanded far more subtly we make for ourselves. The film is thus a mishmash of influences completely lacking a sense of individuality. Let those in search of titillation from a film so entitled beware. "La Vie Sexuelle" is almost puritanically staid. It belongs to a much older Wave than the New.

It's the best French film of the decade and perhaps one of the greatest investigations into young love ever made. Mathieu Amalric is a revelation and demonstrates he's one of the finest young actors in the entire world. I love this film, and it makes me so happy to know it exists.