Those familiar with Catherine Breillat’s films would probably be loathe to classify them as comedies, what with their fixation on familial perversions, domination, gender stratification, sodomy, voyeurism, and sexual distaste, amongst other cosmopolitan topics. However, Sex Is Comedy seems intended to be quite a funny movie—at least I found myself laughing out loud, even if most of the viewers at my Film Forum screening did not. The film’s humor lies in the inherent awkwardness between people, particularly men and women, and even more particularly when sex is involved. Here, the laughs come with a healthy dose of involuntary cringing.

Sex Is Comedy serves as a counterpart to Breillat’s earlier film, 2001’s Fat Girl, and can be seen as the work of a misunderstood filmmaker talking back to an unreceptive audience. However, the culminating scene wherein the fictional director recreates the pivotal sequence from Fat Girl with the same young actress (Roxane Mesquida) sets Sex Is Comedy apart as more than just an exercise in filmmaking inside jokes and industry self-congratulation. It deserves to be remembered as an important stride, whether that’s technically of 2002’s crop or that of 2004.

Standing in for Breillat is Jeanne (La Femme Nikita’s Anne Parillaud), a filmmaker directing a movie with two young actors who must feign lust for each other but have zero on-screen chemistry. The Actress (Roxane Mesquida) is the pouting ingénue French cinema seems to grow like weeds, pretty to look at but not much going on upstairs, while the actor (Grégoire Colin) prances about the set and tries to engage the director in philosophical debate as a means of flirting with her. When Jeanne’s not trying to keep the actor in his place, she spends time preparing with her assistant, Leo (Ashley Wanniger), with whom she also has a complex working friendship/romantic relationship. Jeanne does not shy away from using the male/female dynamic to her fullest advantage. Just when it appears that one of the figures around her may take the upper hand with their tantrums or demands, she yanks it back again with the subtlest of looks or a freezing out at the craft services table. All of these ruthless on-set politics are in the service of her art. Yet the film’s highest drama lies in whether the controlling Jeanne can elicit the important performance from her young actors in a key sex scene. Without it, her film is lost.

The preparation for this pivotal scene takes up the final third of Sex Is Comedy and serves as a primer to Uncomfortable Filmmaking 101, as Jeanne shoos the rest of the crew out of the bedroom set so that she and Leo can block the scene alone. Here she instructs Leo to play the part of the young actress while Jeanne takes over as the actor. It’s a heady mix as the gender dynamics collide with the power struggle inherent to artistic creation. We can’t help but imagine what’s it must be like on a Breillat set. Is Breillat as bossy and manipulative as Jeanne or even more so? Is the graphic sex depicted her films just another day at the office for her and her crew?

Any thoughts of the mundane evaporate once the cameras begin to roll. In particular watching Mesquida inhabit her situation—a young girl losing her virginity in a particularly rough fashion—is quite brutal and emotional. Yet there’s something strangely exhilarating and cathartic about witnessing her play out this scene for the cameras. As Jeanne hovers behind the monitors, it’s as though she is telepathically coaxing the Actress’ emotional release. Walking out of the theater after Sex Is Comedy, I couldn’t help but be reminded that while we feel Jeanne’s triumph over having finally captured her performance on film, Breillat was able to get it twice.