91Èȱ¬

The French have an historical pedigree when it comes to eating cake, so perhaps that's why everybody gets to have theirs (and eat it too) in Cockles & Muscles. In Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's breezy, Côte D'azur-set sex comedy, a holidaying family - husband and wife Marc and Béatrix, their teenage son Charly and his friend Martin - experiences a string of sexual revelations. It's all dished out with dollops of saucy humour and moral tolerance, but is insincere, unedifying stuff.

Marc (Gilbert Melki) has returned, with family in tow, to the holiday home he knew as a youth. The local oysters are a renowned aphrodisiac and he and his coquettish wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) are hopeful they might rejuvenate their lacklustre lovelife. Their teenage son Charly is also coming to grips with his sexuality and, whenever he can, his penis. Into this house of hormones also comes Martin, Charly's oldest friend and recently de-closeted homosexual. In an attempt to prove their easygoing bourgeois mettle, the parents automatically (and incorrectly) reassess the boys' relationship. This mistake sets in motion a series of far greater surprises concerning the adults themselves.

"A DAMP SQUIB"

As everybody digs in at the sexual buffet, there are plenty of upstairs-downstairs night time shenanigans, but Cockles & Muscles thankfully stops short of complete farce. Helmers Ducastel and Martineau treat their characters' monumental lifestyle decisions with idealistic naivety, summed up by a startlingly simplistic happy ending. A closing musical number, which plays like a shoddy school production pastiche of Takeshi Kitano's ´Ü²¹³Ùô¾±³¦³ó¾±, is a damp squib that emphasises the film's utopian daftness.

In French with English subtitles.