Sitcom (1998)

Sorry, this movie sucks

Let's be realistic.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

We are taken to meet a perfect family in a suburb of Paris. The old house has been remodeled in perfect taste. The people that live in this house are bourgeois to the core. They have superb manners. But is everything as perfect as it seems? Francois Ozon, one of the most interesting men working in the French cinema, seems to believe he can show us a different aspect that is not seen on the glossy picture we see.After the father brings home a lab rat, it becomes everyone's pet. The son one day declares at the dinner table he is gay, to her mother's dismay. The father accepts the fact with philosophy. After all, he muses, weren't men in ancient Greece practitioners of this sexual preference? After all, they were well adjusted and no one batted an eyelash. The daughter, who is having intimate relations with her boyfriend, decides to jump out of a window and become paraplegic. The mother, decides one evening to show her son how things are done in the heterosexual world.The father is given an ultimatum: Get rid of the rat, or else. His way of dealing with the little creature is to practice all his gourmet knowledge on the pet with surprising results. The family, as a whole decides to deal with the monster the father created in a cruel way, but by doing so, peace and tranquility returns to the household again.Mr. Ozon asks us to see the family in a different way. After all, how many families do we know that are picture perfect? Or at least, akin to the image the ubiquitous 'sitcoms' on television wants to impose on us. The director shows why he is one of the best minds working in movies these days.We particularly enjoyed the work of Evelyne Dandry, who plays the mother in the story with great panache. She is the model of BCBG. She will never be seen without a perfect wardrobe, or a hair out of place. The other great contribution is from Lucia Sanchez, who appears as the maid. She undergoes a transformation, beginning as a normal person, then takes a new persona as she is given the responsibility of taking care of Sophie, the paraplegic. Marina DeVan and Adrien DeVan are seen as the daughter, and son of this messed up household. Francois Marthouret underplays the father role.The last scene in the film shows the family at a cemetery as the white lab rat plays atop the black marble tomb. A fit closure for this delightful film.

I love Francois Ozon's films. Together with this, I have seen all his feature-length work (Sitcom, Criminal Lovers, Drops Falling On Burning Rocks, Under the Sand, 8 Women, Swimming Pool). "Sitcom" is the film by him that I found the most bizarre and unsettling (even though I had some good laughs). The ending was a bit too much, but otherwise, I quite liked it. The atmosphere and the bizarre events sometimes reminded me of "Criminal Lovers", that he made immediately afterwards, but with more focus on black humor than in the latter.The whole way through, the story of "Sitcom" reminded me of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Theorem" (Teorema) - much more than of Bunuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", already mentioned here. In Pasolini's 1968 film, a strange visitor unsettles the life of an Italian bourgeois family: after he leaves, the daughter loses her mind, starts lying catatonicly on her bed and has to be transferred to a mental institution; the mother, in a desperate urge for promiscuity, picks up handsome young men on the streets for sex; the maid goes back to her village and becomes a levitating saint; the son discovers his talent for painting (and probably realizes that he is gay); the father at first seems not to be affected, but then he also succumbs to the influence. Ozon's film seems to take up this motif and transfer it to a very-very black farce and a parody of American sitcoms (I love the set design with all those bright colors!). People here (especially the mother) always try to "talk things out" like in the sitcoms, but it doesn't really work, because the environment is/has become so different.At the very end, though, everyone seems to have found themselves at last: from a dysfunctional family, they have apparently become a happy family again - though not exactly in the traditional, conservative way. But the white rat is still lurking everywhere...

This film is Francois Ozon's debut, which made him one of the most promising young directors of Europe. Here we have a story, which can be treated as taken as modern 'The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie' by Luis Bunuel. Here a typical French family alters in the most disturbing way. The whole madness starts when father brings home a lab rat. Next the son at the dinner stands and declaims that since that moment he is a gay. Then his sister jumps out of the window trying to commit a suicide...And so on. And the story keeps going till the unusual end, which contains one of the most bizarre sequences in modern European cinema. Acting is at very high level, and so is the directing. Dialogs are pretty witty and memorable. It is difficult to name a genre of this movie, but the closest is - black comedy.

It is a non-coherent movie with every imaginable distortion crammed into a couple of rooms and a wasted hour. Controversy can only get a movie some cheap and shortlived popularity. For this movie, even this is not true. Alors!! avoid it and save precious time.