My Sex Life... or How I Got into an Argument
| My Sex Life... or How I Got into an Argument | |
|---|---|
| File:Comment je me suis disputé... (ma vie sexuelle).jpg Film poster | |
| Directed by | Arnaud Desplechin |
| Written by | Arnaud Desplechin Emmanuel Bourdieu |
| Produced by | Pascal Caucheteux |
| Starring | Mathieu Amalric |
| Cinematography | Stéphane Fontaine Eric Gautier Dominique Perrier-Royer |
| Edited by | Eszter Majoros |
| Music by | Krishna Levy |
Production companies | |
| Distributed by | BAC Films |
Release date |
|
Running time | 178 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Budget | $4 million |
| Box office | $1.9 million[1] |
My Sex Life... or How I Got into an Argument (French: Comment je me suis disputé... (ma vie sexuelle)) is a 1996 French drama film directed by Arnaud Desplechin. It competed for the Palme d'Or at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.[2] It won the César Award for Most Promising Actor (Mathieu Amalric) and was also nominated for Most Promising Actress (Emmanuelle Devos and Jeanne Balibar). The film ensured Desplechin's and Amalric's career launches in the 90s as respected director and actor respectively (although they had both initially worked towards the reverse). Historically it also marks one of Marion Cotillard's very first roles in the industry.
My Sex Life... follows the story of a PhD student and lecturer in philosophy, Paul Dédalus, as he struggles to break up with his longtime girlfriend, has conflicted feelings about his two mistresses - who are also his friends' partners -, and has a difficult time facing a new colleague, appointed head of the "epistemology department", a former friend who dislikes him for reasons Paul cannot remember. The Catholic conversion and religious concerns of Paul's younger brother, Ivan, are a subplot in the movie.
Being nearly three hours long, the movie's representation of a daily life in Paris follows a similar pattern to Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore from 1973, a cult post-French New Wave film lasting three hours and forty minutes. Similar dialogues and epigrammatic lines or quotations on life, love and friendship are found in both works. Maurice Pialat's interest for "realistic" circumstances has been cited by Desplechin as a major influence on his work in general.[3]
Other versions of the Paul Dédalus character appear in A Christmas Tale (2008), My Golden Days (2015) and Filmlovers! (2024). These later productions also feature Amalric.
Cast
[edit | edit source]- Mathieu Amalric as Paul Dedalus
- Emmanuelle Devos as Esther
- Marianne Denicourt as Sylvia
- Emmanuel Salinger as Nathan
- Thibault de Montalembert as Bob
- Chiara Mastroianni as Patricia
- Denis Podalydès as Jean-Jacques
- Jeanne Balibar as Valérie
- Fabrice Desplechin as Ivan
- Hélène Lapiower as Le Mérou
- Michel Vuillermoz as Frédéric Rabier
- Roland Amstutz as Chernov
- Marion Cotillard as Student
References
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External links
[edit | edit source]- My Sex Life... or How I Got into an Argument at IMDbLua error in Module:WikidataCheck at line 29: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).
- My Sex Life... or How I Got into an Argument at Rotten TomatoesLua error in Module:WikidataCheck at line 29: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).
- 1996 films
- 1996 drama films
- French drama films
- 1990s French-language films
- Films directed by Arnaud Desplechin
- Films with screenplays by Arnaud Desplechin
- Films set in Paris
- 1990s French films
- Films scored by Krishna Levy
- French-language drama films
- Why Not Productions films
- Arte France Cinéma films
- France 2 Cinéma films
- BAC Films films
- Films featuring a Most Promising Actor César Award–winning performance
- 1990s drama film stubs
- 1990s French film stubs