Comment je me suis dispute... (‘ma vie sexuelle’)

Way, way too long, and a terrible dvd transfer to boot, but I managed to sit through all three hours. The problems here begin with the title, which is rendered in English as My Sex Life...or, How I Got into an Argument, just the sort of wordy indirection this film traffics in. A bunch of attractive but annoying thirtyish academics try to sort out their love lives. The characters, like the writer/director Arnaud Desplechin, are way too much in love with themselves; nobody is quite real to anyone else, so nobody is quite real to us, despite some amusingly familiar quirks, and oddball scenes like the dead monkey behind the radiator. This is the third movie with Mathieu Amalric that I’ve seen in a week, and I am willing to see more, he’s sort of a Gallic Peter Sarsgaard. (1996, dvd, n.) *5+*