My Sex Life movie storyline. Arnaud Desplechin’s comedy about a doctoral student (Mathieu Amalric) approaching thirty, plagued with self-doubt, is a hallmark of ’90s French cinema. Paul Dédalus is slowly realising that, as Gainsbourg wrote, ‘physical love is a dead end’. But beyond the film’s titular concerns (My Sex Life), its strength is in its surprising progression. Paul’s self-absorbed narrative branches out into a network of polyphonic plot lines, introducing a cast of neurotic and touching characters – all seeking, finding or avoiding each other in 1990s Paris.
My Sex Life… or How I Got into an Argument (French: Comment je me suis disputé… (ma vie sexuelle)) is a 1996 French drama film directed by Arnaud Desplechin. It was entered into the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. It won the César Award for Most Promising Actor (Mathieu Amalric) and was also nominated for Most Promising Actress (Emmanuelle Devos and Jeanne Balibar).
Film Review for My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument
Arnaud Desplechin’s ”How I Got Into an Argument… (My Sex Life)” spends three chatty, stubbornly beguiling hours in the company of Paul Dedalus, a man who truly loves women. Both Paul and the film would seem maddening if they weren’t so passionately sincere, and if Paul did not gaze at the film’s many beautiful young actresses with such an amazed, seductive gleam in his eye. Though the disheveled Paul (played with sly panache by Mathieu Amalric) is no matinee idol, it’s not hard to see why he has three hours’ worth of love and friendship to dissect here. His character burns with rueful romanticism and the film does too.
Paul is also consummately French, which means that he has courted at least one girlfriend with the help of a theology text and is dismayed by a woman who doesn’t smoke (”Well, that’s no fun at all”). Nearly as obsessively pensive as that other Dedalus, he finds no crisis of amour too insignificant for endless analysis and discussion.
Becalmed in graduate school, Paul teaches philosophy while trying to break off a 10-year relationship with Esther (Emmanuelle Devos), who becomes the occasion for one of Mr. Desplechin’s more exasperating indulgences. The film thinks nothing of devoting 15 minutes to Esther’s worries over her irregular menstrual cycle, which makes it all the more remarkable that Paul’s story remains as coyly disarming as it does.
A score card is nearly necessary to keep track of the many friendships and affairs that Paul describes. There is Sylvia (Marianne Denicourt), stunningly beautiful but inconveniently involved with Paul’s friend. (When Paul glimpses Sylvia naked in a locker room and she unabashedly returns his gaze, Mr. Desplechin delivers the kind of flirty eroticism that keeps this film going well beyond any reasonable running time.) There is Valerie (Jeanne Balibar), crazy and provocative, who pulls off her sweater one day announcing, ”And now, the real world!”
These events unfold to the accompaniment of solemn narration. (”Valerie is serious and violent. Paul is sincere and gentle. For this reason, they inevitably fall in love.”) But ”How I Got Into An Argument” has its self-mocking humor too, especially in regard to Paul’s academic career. When an old rival named Frederic Rabier (Michel Vuillermoz) arrives as head of the epistemology department, this sets off a crisis that would seem more serious if it did not also involve Rabier’s beloved monkey. ”Do you have a soul, or are you just a hairy machine?” the would-be waggish professor asks his pet. In addition to heightening this film’s resemblance to a marathon, philosophically inclined French ”Friends,” monkey trouble later sends Paul into a catatonic trance.
The patience required by Mr. Desplechin, who has made a much more ingratiating film than his earlier ”Sentinelle,” is frequently rewarded by such flashes of droll humor. There is, for instance, the sight of Paul skimming a text called ”Ma Philosophie” for a crash course in Rabier’s thinking. And this is a film in which a distraught love letter may make reference to ”Peer Gynt,” or a character can drift from communism to Catholicism after a brief, pointless period spent studying Danish. ”A tiny, faraway country,” he sighs proudly, capturing this film’s comic fondness for the futile endeavor. ”And it was totally useless.”
”How I Got Into an Argument… (My Sex Life)” will be shown at Alice Tully Hall tonight at 8:45 and Saturday at 11 A.M. as part of the New York Film Festival.
My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument (1997)
Directed by: Arnaud Desplechin
Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos, Emmanuel Salinger, Marianne Denicourt, Chiara Mastroianni, Jeanne Balibar, Denis Podalydès, Hélène Lapiower, Marion Cotillard
Screenplay by: Arnaud Desplechin, Emmanuel Bourdieu
Cinematography by: Stéphane Fontaine, Eric Gautier, Dominique Perrier-Royer
Film Editing by: Laurence Briaud, François Gédigier
Costume Design by: Claire Gerard-Hirne, Delphine Hayat
Art Direction by: Antoine Platteau
Music by: Mike Kourtzer, Krishna Levy
Distributed by: Zeitgeist Films
Release Date: September 17, 1997
Hits: 236
