My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument
Director: Arnaud Desplechin
Year Released: 1996
Rating: 1.5
Poor Mother and the Whore imitation about youngish intellectuals trying to balance out their careers and relationships but only managing to demolish both - the lead character (Mathieu Amalric) is too confident and serious to pass as Jean-Pierre Léaud's ingenious man-child fuck-up, and his own self-absorption is at times too much to endure. It certainly doesn't help his cause that Desplechin made this a three-hour movie of endless chatter and philosophical voice-over, which is fine in small amounts but becomes stifling well before the movie ends. A further complication is that all three of the women Amalric woos and (sometimes) has sex with appear to be somewhat deranged (Amalric doesn't care - or seem to be aware of - how he hurts them, too busy consumed with himself; one scene I enjoyed was watching him fall down a flight of stairs and having no one help him up). Even one of the perverse 'gags' (a visual digression) - the one involving a superstar instructor's pet monkey and a radiator - feels lifted from some other, much quirkier movie.
