La confusion des genres

"Confusion of Genders" is all about Alain, a wishy-washy lawyer and mostly gay bisexual who has a male lover, a female fiancé, and another female who is lusting after him for reasons unknown. Although the film is well crafted with believable performances and solid production value, the story is a depressingly misanthropic satire in which no one has a good word to say to anyone during the entire run leaving us, the audience, detached and with no one to care about. The result is a less than satisfying watch with a bad after taste, when combined with lots of inconsequential dialogue and, hence, subtitle reading will make for a less than desirable watch for most. Only for French film fanatics who don't mind lots of graphic gay sex. (B-)

A giant custard pie smack in the kisser of anyone who has ever claimed "but I'm really bisexual," when that's not the case at all "La Confusion des Genres" is miles ahead of the formulaic likes of "Le Placard" when it comes to making a comedy about gay life today. As he's shown in films as diverse as "Pauline at the Beach" and "Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train," Pascal Greggory is a master of guilty sexual sneakiness. Worth seeing for the wedding scene alone.

Just watched this and came here to read the comments and see the rating. I never would have guessed this is meant to be a comedy. Maybe it doesn't translate, culturally. It didn't strike me as funny in the least. What I saw was the central character, a male bisexual, pivoting between men and women without any rhyme or reason. I suppose that's the joke--that bisexuality offers too many options.

Seriously, I saw one or two things that were amusing, particularly at the end, but there was little in this movie other than the tragic consequences of indecision. Not funny. Then again, maybe it's just my puritan heritage shining through.

The actors are pretty, and I found it interesting to watch (it's France!), but I can't say it was really worthwhile. Put it at the bottom of your Netflix list.

At the first sigh, an easy French comedy. Nice, seductive, proposing a large ball of sentimental relations, a confuse lawyer and a gallery of characters around him, a wife and a boyfriend and a client in huge confusion of sentiments but decised to demonstrate his love to his girfriend , an lawyer looking for certitudes and real love, for happiness and comfortable compromises.

At the second view, it can be a provocative challenge to reflection about the other and yourself, about life stuffs and proper options.

In both perspectives, a smart crafted film .The cast remains the basic virtue of the film -, from Pascal Greggory and Vincent Martinez to Cyrille Thovenin, not ignoring Nathalie Richard and Julie Gayet.

No wonder the French like Jerry Lewis slapstick. The subtitles they see in his films shown in France must be like the actual dialogue of this homegrown attempt at a verbal rendering of the same kind of meaningless nonsense. Add a little skin, a little "confusion des genres," a little mad racing around, and some highly implausible courtroom and backroom high jinks, and you have something close to what the Marx Brothers might have done had they been inclined to do it in drag with some R-rated messing around.

I know enough French to appreciate some of the scenes in which everything is made up of non sequiturs and oblique angst, especially those between Alain and Laurance. There is a degree of cleverness that has a certain appeal. But the actors cannot even at their best overcome a plodding direction of a script that probably reads better than it looks on screen.

Once again comes an example of the maxim that in comedy, timing is everything. Add to that the usual caveat that much can be lost in translation.