Karina on SpoutBlog

In what will hopefully end up as my stupidest move at the Cannes market this year, on Monday I went to a buyers screening of a film called Sex and Breakfast. The suspiciously unspecific description in the Marche guide: “Two couples uncover what it takes to achieve a long-term romance while maintaining a healthy and satisfying sexual relationship.” Just from those two scraps of information, we can immediately deduce that this film is one of two things: A) so-bad-its-good Euro softcore, or B), not-quite-bad-enough to be so-bad-it’s-good throat clearing from a first-time American indie filmmaker who hasn’t yet figured out that working one’s personal sexual fantasies out on celluloid really only befits aged masters (and most of the time even then, it’s questionable.)

Since I knew that Sex and Breakfast was in English, I knew from the start that it almost definitely fell into the “B” camp. So why waste my time? Three words: Starring Macaulay Culkin.

The basic thrust of the story (ah, puns): Culkin can’t make his sexpot girlfriend come, so she suggests they go to a sex therapist who specializes in proscribing polygamy. Meanwhile, in some alternate universe section of Los Angeles where everyone not only takes cabs, but hails them on the street, Eliza Dushku gets upset when her hunky boyfriend with an identifiable foreign accent admits that he masturbates, and they go to the slut shrink, too. Dr. Orgy (a woman of maybe 70, which might be a Dr. Ruth reference, or might just be to make sure we know that sexual experimentation is a bad idea from the get go, because it’s associated with the idea of old ladies fucking) eventually hooks the two couples up, of course, but she takes almost the entire film to do it. This leaves a lot of time for long dialogue scenes, in which Culkin gets to say things like “What’s important? Pussy, and lots of it!” and Dushku attempts to repair her boyfriend’s ego by saying things like, “Shut up, I love your penis!” The couples do finally get around to Doing It, but it’s the most boring sex scene of all time, all above-the-shoulders shots of one swapped couple kissing intercut with the meaningful stares of the other couple from across the room.

The trailer, embedded above, makes a lot of promises (Dushku-on-Girl Resembling Jessica Alba action! Post-coital grown-up Culkin!) on which the film itself can’t really deliver. The lesbian plotline is, actually substantial, but never consumated. Culkin, who still doesn’t look old enough to be having sex, is actually appropriately cast as the boyfriend without balls; pity about his inability to deliver a believable line reading. And the real kiss of death: there’s isn’t even any nudity. I’m all for shameless schlock––see my continued show of love for the life achievements of Lloyd Kaufmann–but there’s nothing worse than a film that sells itself as cheap and dirty but ultimately turns out to have earnest things to say about relationships. The only thing shameful about Sex and Breakfast is its unwillingness to get really shameful.

Sex and Breakfast is already available on DVD in the States––in fact, the entire thing has been uploaded to YouTube––but I didn’t know that until after the screening. I’d tell you that if I had known, I wouldn’t have gone to the screening, but I don’t know who I’d be kidding. The YouTube clips aren’t embeddable, but if you want to skip directly to the ludicrously unsatisfying sex scene, go here.