Summary
Life in a respectable middle-class family home takes a bizarre turn one day when the father
adopts a white laboratory rat as a house pet. All who come into contact with the
rat undergo a sudden change of personality, losing his or her sexual inhibitions.
It begins when the son, Nicholas, admits he is homosexual during a dinner party.
His mother, horrified by the declaration, is prepared to do anything to cure him, even
sleeping with him herself. The daughter, robbed of attention, attempts to kill herself.
She survives, but, crippled, subjects her doting boyfriend to sado-masochistic sex sessions,
at the same time as her brother is hosting group orgies in his bedroom. Seemingly
oblivious to these developments, the father starts to undergo the biggest transformation
of all...
Review
Having made a dozen or so controversial and often hugely imaginative short and medium-length
films, François Ozon achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his first full-length
film, Sitcom in 1998. Since, the young director (barely into his thirties)
has quickly acquired a reputation as one of the most radical but exciting new talents
in French cinema, winning critical acclaim for his film eye-opening 2000 film Sous
la sable.
Sitcom is certainly less polished and satisfying than some of Ozon’s subsequent
films, and most spectators will find the jet black comedy (involving almost every permutation
of sexual perversion, including bestiality) to be in extreme bad taste. In spite
of this, it is an extremely entertaining film in places, with some moments of unbridled
and genuine hilarity, yet at the same time it has an intellectual appeal which other intentionally
"sick" comedies lack. Ozon has clearly been greatly influenced by the work
of Luis Buñuel, the Spanish master of film surrealism, since he freely adopts some
of Buñuel's techniques (such as the merging of reality and dreams), often to great
effect.
The film is as much a satire on the trite formula of television sitcoms, with their predictable
characters and nauseatingly cosy atmosphere, as on French bourgeois life.
Comedy at the expense of the middle classes is hardly a recent feature of French cinema
- examples of the genre can be traced back to the origins of cinema itself, and some of
the world’s greatest directors (Buñuel most obviously) have made a career knocking
wind out of the sails of the Bourgeoisie. What is new, and more exciting, is that
Ozon adopts the sitcom format for his film and then breaks all of the rules (plus a few
others), the result being the total opposite of a cosy family teatime comedy.
The main reason why Sitcom works as well as it does is because of its unpredictability
and its novelty value. For this reason, it has to be a one-off, and even by the
end of this film Ozon is having to resort to more and more extreme (and increasingly surreal)
plot developments to prevent the film from sagging.
Ozon should be commended on the originality of his script and, more crucially, on his
ability to make the best out of his limited resources. Sitcom is a very low
budget film by today's standards, but that is scarcely noticeable, or important;
indeed it is only really apparent at the end of the film, when’s Ozon’s ambitions for
an explosive finale overtake his directoral judgement.
Sitcom may not be a faultless piece of cinema, but it is relentlessly funny, daringly
original, shockingly stylish and terrifyingly unpredictable.
© James Travers 2002
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