Sitcom

SITCOM   ***

François Ozon

1998

IDEA:  A small white rat unleashes torrents of hidden desire in a seemingly idyllic suburban abode.

BLURB:  From its prologue, in which a suburban dad murders his family offscreen during a surprise birthday celebration, Ozon’s debut feature film makes blatantly clear the sardonic intention of its title. The director will proceed to not only gleefully upend the banal trappings of the classic television sitcom, but to mock and subvert the patriarchal nuclear family structure, gender roles, and bourgeois attitudes that underpin it. Sitcom wastes no time perverting these basic principles; within minutes of the father’s introduction of a white rat to the household, the family’s repressed desires erupt in a maelstrom of psychosexual chaos. The rodent’s connotations of abjection, coupled with the alterity of the maid’s African boyfriend, are turned on their heads by Ozon, who understands that “outside” influences are merely scapegoats for irrepressible feelings that come from within. This is something only the father seems to grasp as he facilitates and delights in the spiraling debauchery of his suddenly sex-crazed family. In one of many sharp subversions, the patriarch here is passive and fey, a figure whose ambiguous sexuality and eventual polymorphism put him at a far remove from the archetypal man of the house. His actions may set off the erotic hijinks, but it is the absence of his governing paternal superego that Ozon posits, with tongue in cheek, as the true cause of familial-domestic degradation. As rough around the edges as it might be, Sitcom offers enough pithy, surrealist social observation to make its funhouse antics more than mere surface provocation.