BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Beulah Bram A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Persona1986 Sitcom is the story of a bourgeois French family whose life is seriously affected when the father (François Marthouret)brings home a new pet: a white lab rat. This animal will prove having an almost hypnotic influence over the family members, causing each of them to release their darkest sides at the slightest physical contact with it. The first to fall is the son (Adrien de Van), who admits himself homosexual at a family dinner. He will be followed short after that by the maid's husband, Abdu (Jules-Emmanuel Eyoum Deido) Then, it's the turn of the daughter (Sophie, played by Marina de Van): she tries to kill herself but fails and becomes paraplegic. From that on, she will subject his loving boyfriend (Stéphane Rideau)to sadomasochistic practices, taking advantage of his devotion to humiliate him. When the mother (Evelyne Dandry) can't stand her world falling apart, she finally overcomes her fear towards the rat and falls under its spell, causing a desperate attempt to "cure" her son from homosexuality. Having said all this, where is the father? Well, let's say he's guilty from bringing the rat to the house. There's a connection between both, rodent and family chief, two sides of the same problem... one the metaphor of the other, perhaps. From rather absurd premises, director and writer François Ozon creates a short, overwhelming comedy —which might not be that subtle but doesn't intend to be either— about family miseries, undressed by the detonating presence of a little, white excuse.

Chris Knipp A wry funny look at the bourgeois family and sexual temptation. According to the French movie website Allociné this is Ozon's first full-length film. Perhaps that's not totally accurate. But assuming that it is, he got off to kind of a late start (he was thirty-one then, now he's about thirty-eight) but has had a pretty amazing, high-profile career since then. The father brings home a pet white rat and the sight or touch of it seems to make everybody go sexually haywire beginning with the son's dinner declaration that he's gay. Well-paced amusing outrageous polymorphously perverse and at the same time in a French way genteel, Sitcom has the bright glossy upper middle-class look you'd probably expect from a TV family comedy. An American newspaper reviewer said this is "John Waters crossed with Eric Rohmer," but for various reasons that is silly. At first I thought Ozon was somewhat derivatively channeling Almodóvar, and there is even an obstreperous Spanish housemaid. Ozon's personal touch is that she has an African husband who seduces boys in his gym classes. Ed Gonzalez got it right when he wrote that this is a bad movie but "its queering of genre conventions is still refreshing." It's not revolutionary though, and that goes for all his films I've seen (Water Drops on Burning Rocks is still on my to-see list): Criminal Lovers, Under the Sand, 8 Women, Swimming Pool, 5x2. He's had fun with these and so have we, but there's a certain lack of conviction or consistent style (apart from the gay sensibility) and given that, it's worth looking back at this "minor" effort. It may have more meat in it -- and confront more personal demons -- than the slick ones with Charlotte Rampling.We can track back those demons in the US DVD's one extra -- Ozon's very first film, a seven-minute silent in color made in 1988, Photo de famille (Family Photo). Like many fledgling efforts the cast consists of the young filmmaker's family members and they're used to show how a youth casually kills his whole family after dinner, poisons his mother, stabs his sister and smothers his father -- with a smile on his face every time, and then props up the dead bodies on a couch and poses with them for an automatic camera photo, throwing back his head and grinning from ear to ear. The young killer (Guillaume Ozon) looks like River Phoenix so that's a plus that would not have eluded the filmmaker whose young male principals in Les amants criminels were good enough looking to be given the full lush gay beauty treatment by the super-campy photo team Pierre et Gilles. Sitcom obviously realizes this early fantasy of intra-familial hostilities with a lot of embroidery added. Sitcom's siblings are played by an actual brother and sister, Marina and Adrien de Van (they sound like the incestuous siblings in Nabokov's Ada!), Marina being an old collaborator and schoolmate of Ozon's who's made films of her own. It's an amusing touch that Stephane Rideau, who's starred in and directed a number of gay films, plays the sister's straight boyfriend. I assume the Ozons in Family Photo are the actual brother and sister and mother and father. Ozon is doing the same thing in Sitcom; it's just more elaborate.

harrytrue "Sitcom" deals with an interesting story of a dysfunctional family. It veers from fantasy to reality.The family of "Sitcom" is tolerant-in this family, you have to be. The mother discovers a unique way of trying to treat her sons' attraction to men, and the daughter tries to branch out. Won't get any more detailed. It does show a brother and sister being very close, bathing together and talking about sex (but not doing it). There are disfuntional families like this, that's the not so funny part.If "Sitcom" was about a normal family, nobody would watch it. Shakespeare only wrote about disfuntional families. On the other hand, what is a normal family?

meitschi I love Francois Ozon's films. Together with this, I have seen all his feature-length work (Sitcom, Criminal Lovers, Drops Falling On Burning Rocks, Under the Sand, 8 Women, Swimming Pool). "Sitcom" is the film by him that I found the most bizarre and unsettling (even though I had some good laughs). The ending was a bit too much, but otherwise, I quite liked it. The atmosphere and the bizarre events sometimes reminded me of "Criminal Lovers", that he made immediately afterwards, but with more focus on black humor than in the latter.The whole way through, the story of "Sitcom" reminded me of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Theorem" (Teorema) - much more than of Bunuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", already mentioned here. In Pasolini's 1968 film, a strange visitor unsettles the life of an Italian bourgeois family: after he leaves, the daughter loses her mind, starts lying catatonicly on her bed and has to be transferred to a mental institution; the mother, in a desperate urge for promiscuity, picks up handsome young men on the streets for sex; the maid goes back to her village and becomes a levitating saint; the son discovers his talent for painting (and probably realizes that he is gay); the father at first seems not to be affected, but then he also succumbs to the influence. Ozon's film seems to take up this motif and transfer it to a very-very black farce and a parody of American sitcoms (I love the set design with all those bright colors!). People here (especially the mother) always try to "talk things out" like in the sitcoms, but it doesn't really work, because the environment is/has become so different.At the very end, though, everyone seems to have found themselves at last: from a dysfunctional family, they have apparently become a happy family again - though not exactly in the traditional, conservative way. But the white rat is still lurking everywhere...