By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: September 9, 2005
Watching the featherweight French farce "Côte d'Azur" provides the oxymoronic sensation of looking at a pornographic movie with no real sex or even a credible approximation of erotic heat. The stream of gay and straight couplings in this dizzy pansexual comedy is contrived and ludicrous, much like the random couplings in a pornographic film.
Punctuating the gasps and groans of actors filmed going at it (but strictly above the waist) are tiresome running jokes about shellfish and aphrodisiacs and the benefits of hot water as an autoerotic stimulant. Topping off this stale meringue are two silly songs mugged by the actors with a cutesy cheerfulness that makes you want to reach into the screen and shut them up.
The central characters, Béatrix (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Marc (Gilbert Melki), are a seemingly happy couple on vacation on the French Riviera in the house where Marc spent summer vacations as a youth. They have two teenage children: Laura (Sabrina Seyvecou), who disappears on a motorcycle with her boyfriend early in the movie, and 17-year-old Charly (Romain Torres), a tousle-haired, androgynous-looking boy who is joined by his ferretlike best friend, Martin (Édouard Collin).
The boys are so chummy that Béatrix and Marc conclude that they must be lovers. Charly's possible homosexuality doesn't bother Béatrix, who boasts smugly that being Dutch makes her supremely tolerant, but it upsets Marc, who is not quite what he seems. After he accidentally observes Martin self indulgence in a shower, he is aroused and rushes back to Béatrix to have the first steamy sex they've had in ages.
We learn early in the film that of the two friends, only Martin is gay. Charly doesn't bother to correct his parents' misperception until much later. In the meantime, Béatrix is stalked by Mathieu (Jacques Bonnaffé), an ugly, balding satyr who surprises her by leaping naked out of the bushes for a quickie. Martin, frustrated by his unrequited lust for Charly, cruises the shore and meets Didier (Jean-Marc Barr), a gay plumber, who knew Marc way back when.
"Côte d'Azur," written and directed by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, would like to be a hybrid of "Pauline at the Beach" and "The Young Girls of Rochefort," filtered through the comic imagination of Georges Feydeau. Neither funny nor sexy, nor leavened by the wistful laissez-faire wisdom of the typical sophisticated Gallic comedy, it is less than a trifle.
source:nytimes.com
