Cote d'Azur (Crustaces & Coquillages) or in English Cote d'Azur (Cockles & Muscles) is a French comedy drama directed by Oliver Ducastel and Jacques Martineau and released in 2006.
The film follows events in one family who have inherited a house on the Cote d'Azur and go there on holiday. The parents (played by Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Gilbert Melki) begin to believe that their son is gay when his openly gay friend comes to stay with them. The mother's lover (Jacques Bonnaffé) shows up at the resort and the father rediscovers his teenage romance with a local man (Jean-Marc Barr).
Reviews are mixed, the Guardian gave it a 3/5 rating and called it a "a fitfully amusing, sympathetically played sex comedy" while review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 50% rating from critics and a 62% audience rating. The majority of reviews seem to mark it as OK however Cole Smithey gave it one star and described it as "an act of cinematic masturbation against a pastel background".
French sex comedy is not really one of my favoured genres, however I watched it with the mistaken assumption that it would be funny and in the hope that it may be of similar quality to the charming, whimsical and intricate French romantic comedy Amelie. I was badly wrong on both counts, the film was as funny as toothache and as charming and intricate as internet porn. I really struggle to see how anyone could claim that the film was "fitfully amusing" unless they are big fans of titillation and simplistic potty humour. I mean how many times do you need to be shown blokes wanking in the shower before it stops being funny?
One of the main faults with the film is the fact that it is absolutely impossible to establish any emotional empathy with any of the characters who are nothing more than vacuous ciphers to the "plot". The mother is not motivated to become unfaithful through suffering an unloving relationship or lack of sex but just from boredom. The father character drifts listlessly through the film until he has his gay encounter. The son (Romain Torres) is annoying and decietful, he decides to trick his parents into thinking that he is gay, incessantly teases his gay friend (Edouard Collin) by challenging him to wanking competitions and hanging around him half naked.
The other characters in the film are utterly two dimensional, the daughter leaves with her biker boyfriend around ten minutes into the film and only comes back for the ridiculous finale, the father's lover could have been an interesting heartbroken character however his distasteful habit of going to the local cottaging site to pick up teenage boys every night precludes empathy.
When it eventually comes out that the parents have both been sleeping with other people one would expect some feelings of betrayal, recrimination and anger, however instead of taking the opportunity to explore a potentially interesting emotional situation the film sidesteps the issue and the couple immediately cuddle and make up. After the affairs the film jumps to the following summer when the cast all come together for a group holiday with the parents happily rooming with their new partners. The film finishes with a reprise of their vapid and excruciatingly bad song about seafood.
The film is dreadful, it trivialises all the interesting issues such as; teenage boys discovering their sexuality, adulterous relationships, the difficulties of being a gay man in a conventional family, the reliving of a teenage romance in later life and the emotional aftermath of betrayal. It seems incapable of properly addressing female sexuality sending the teenage daughter character away to avoid dealing with her sexuality and making the mother an emotionless slut that has sex with two men for no other reason than boredom. This really is a film to avoid unless you are the kind of person that finds Sex in the City hilarious and well observed.
See also
Cote d'Azur (Crustaces & Coquillages) at Wikipedia
Cote d'Azur (Crustaces & Coquillages) at Rotten Tomatoes
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