Matrixston Wow! Such a good movie.

AboveDeepBuggy Some things I liked some I did not.

Tetrady not as good as all the hype

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Chris Knipp The "confusion" here is more a plethora, an embarrassment of riches and of choices. At the center of every scene is bisexual (or is he just gay?) lawyer Alain (Pascal Greggory). Everybody wants him, or thinks he wants them -- handsome imprisoned murderer Marc (Vincent Martinez), cute gay boy Christophe (Cyrille Thouvenin), attractive and accomplished law partner Laurence (Nathalie Richard, who's more Alain's age); the prisoner's (former) girlfriend Babette (Julie Gayet); Marc's prison-mate Étienne (noted singer Alain Bashung) even gets amusingly involved at the end. Alain and his law partner are talking about marrying, and it's all practical and boring, except that it's impulsive too. Through it all Pascal Greggory has that bored, annoyed look he always has; but he registers a lot of other looks too -- he's a skillful movie actor and for good reason one of the busiest in France. This is very French, a sort of comedy of ill humor, sex, and indecision. The hilariously grumpy and irritable "haute bourgeoisie" relatives of Laurence and Alain who come into play when wedding bells are in the offing include the great Bulle Ogier as Laurence's mother. The various nude scenes aren't just titillation; they're all skillfully and sometimes hilariously illustrative of characters and situations and of Alain's "embarras du choix.""La Confusion des genres" is dry and amusing and well paced and has an excellent cast but it's very French and you wouldn't necessarily expect it to go over well with Americans, and it didn't. US critics pretty much hated it. On Metacritic it got a 39. Many American viewers think it's pretentious and unfunny. They miss the witty but blunt dialogue (which all the French critics complement), and they don't appreciate Greggory, who's perfect here, or the delicately observed range of French social and personality types. This is as good a treatment of the pains and pleasures of the bisexual life as seen from the French 21st-century standpoint as, at the time, was John Schlesinger's very English (1971) "Sunday Bloody Sunday"; but as a movie it doesn't carry quite as much weight and clearly like some wines it does not travel well.Doing the voice-over commentary in English for the American DVD didn't turn out very well either. Director Duran Cohen studied at NYU Film School and and is fluent, but he's paired with Greggory and Thouvenin, who're pretty tongue-tied, and the conversation never gets going. Why didn't they do it in French with subtitles as Kassovitz, Cassel, and Reno did so entertainingly for the US "Crimson Rivers" DVD? Then maybe they would have been more relaxed and talkative, as the "Crimson Rivers" team was, and something more informative would have resulted.

arizona-philm-phan (1) Poor Alain......what a strange man. He is damaged goods, and perhaps that's why we are shown several scenes of his mother:: The Queen of Damaged Goods. Alain can sometimes show passion with someone, but he can't be constant with someone.....he can't be monogamous. What a question mark of a human being.(2) But it is not only Alain who needs our pity:: Poor Christophe--- Alain is the opposite of who this young man needs (remember, if you will, what C's own father says that he needs). Cyrille Thouvenin does a very good job with the Christophe role (his performance alone makes this review's 6th Star), but he is able to do oh-so-much more in that greater French production:: "JUST A QUESTION OF LOVE."(3) PS: Alain's life is not just one of Confusion; it is one of utter chaos.

hprice-jr This film is the definitive example of pretentious French film-making at its worst. What could have been a sharp and witty satire on sexual identity is instead a rancid bouillabaisse of tedium. The main protagonist's character is utterly lacking in anything remotely positive and his "conquests" are as equally vapid. Everyone in this film either scowls or pouts and there is nothing likable about the whole bunch. For a film that is suppose to be a black comedy the one glaring omission is humor. It has the feeling of a movie that wishes to be many things but can't quite make up its mind as to what. What it ends up being is just relentlessly tedious. The only humor to be found is in asking ones self, "Do people really talk to each other this way?" One only wishes the ex-con at the end would have wiped out this whole sorry bunch of narcissists and brought some life into this dull mess.

B24 No wonder the French like Jerry Lewis slapstick. The subtitles they see in his films shown in France must be like the actual dialogue of this homegrown attempt at a verbal rendering of the same kind of meaningless nonsense. Add a little skin, a little "confusion des genres," a little mad racing around, and some highly implausible courtroom and backroom high jinks, and you have something close to what the Marx Brothers might have done had they been inclined to do it in drag with some R-rated messing around.I know enough French to appreciate some of the scenes in which everything is made up of non sequiturs and oblique angst, especially those between Alain and Laurance. There is a degree of cleverness that has a certain appeal. But the actors cannot even at their best overcome a plodding direction of a script that probably reads better than it looks on screen.Once again comes an example of the maxim that in comedy, timing is everything. Add to that the usual caveat that much can be lost in translation.