The Opposite Of Sex

Writer-director Don Roos’s debut feature is a smartly written comedy  that relies heavily on its sarcastic bite, something which ix exemplified by its two name characters, 16-year old Deedee Truitt (Christina Ricci) and her antagonist throughout most of the film, Lucia (Lisa Kudrow). For the most part it works although its starts to wear in the latter stages as the plot takes over from character.

Roos uses Deedee’s narration to keep us entertained, the film essentially being an illustration of her freely sarcastic telling of how she splits her home in Louisiana, heads the house of her gay half-brother, Bill (Martin Donovan) where she proceeds to seduce his boyfriend, Matt (Ivan Sergei) and get pregnant to him. Then Matt’s  other boyfriend Jason (Johnny Galecki) falsely tells police that schoolteacher Bill molested him when he was a student. Kudrow’s Lucia is Bill’s now-deceased-of-AIDS boyfriend an embittered, sex-starved spinster who has attached herself to Bill.  

Kudrow and Ricci have most of the good lines and there are plenty of them although Ricci’s character is such a nasty little minx that it is hard to relate to  her. Kudrow, on the other hand, makes it apparent that her self-deprecating sarcasm is a cloak for her vulnerability and this makes her an appealing character, her relationship with Sheriff Carl Tippett (Lyle Lovett) a good-hearted cop who tries unsuccessfully to win her over a winning part of the film. With the exception of Lovett’s Carl you can largely forget about the male cast in terms of bringing anything distinctive to the party. 

As the film's end approaches there’s a lot of manoeuvering to bring the plot into a tidy resolution in terms of both narrative and moral.  Compounded by the fact that Roos has pretty much played his character's cards by this stage the story involving a trip to Canada  feels forced and we the audience a little fatigued by the final 20 minutes. Until then however The Opposite Of Sex is an amusingly misanthropic comedy.

 

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