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

This movie is hillarious, especially to those who might be taking a good number of years to finish their dissertations. Endless hateful characters, endless fun! Both my fiance (whose favourite movies include Dumb and Dumber and Trains, Planes and Automobiles) and I (a Gone with the Wind and Dr. Zhivago type) managed to find much to laugh about here!

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.

I can understand why a lot of people will find this film boring. It's one of the most dialogue heavy films you'll ever see and the sporadic voice-over gives us so many complex and philosophical insights into the characters that it is quite hard to digest.

Having said that, I think this a fantastic film. It is very insightful, drole and poignant- for those who've ever been in any kind of relationship (or better yet, several, simultaneously). The narrative has a funny way of leaping around at times, but generally returns to Paul- whose daily struggles with his relationships to his friends, students and fellow academics cause him a lot of grief and awkward situations. The whole film is beautifully acted, and at times the dialogue soars from scene to scene with studied eloquence. The music is also used to dramatic effect, rendering the small interior changes and developments in the characters into the life changing moments of which they are worthy. I say get this film, some cigarettes, a couple of bottles of wine and a comfy seat. You're in for a treat.

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.