Whether it's fair or not -- and it's not -- you're going to be compared to other recent American movies that deal with suburbia. People are going to talk about "American Beauty" and "Donnie Darko." I don't know if you see any thematic continuity there, but I'm curious how you approached a setting that's become so symbolic.

"American Beauty" I completely hate. I find it a really reprehensible movie because it's making fun of people that live there. I don't respond to "Donnie Darko" at all, because its quirkiness overtakes any sense of reality. But "Ordinary People" I watched a lot. "Ice Storm" I watched a lot. Those are two suburban movies I would embrace. And while mine has certain visual gags, I guess, I'm more in that camp.

I get compared to "Donnie Darko" every frickin' day. That and "Garden State," another movie I hate. I'm not going to argue with the audience. But my take on suburbia is that I have no interest in picking on people, or saying they're "dysfunctional." I hate that phrase. As if there's a family that's functional, you know? It's a very George Bush way to be looking at family: Evil is to be killed, and good will go to heaven.

I grew up in a 1910 Spanish colonial house, but I walked home every day through developments like that, and had this projection that there was all this happiness and togetherness that I didn't feel like I had. So I'm a little bit like the Lars von Trier of America: It's this imaginary thing. But it's very real, and it's still very hard for me to look at the suburbs and understand that it's not as perfect or as well integrated as it seems. That's a 6-year-old's problem, but it's still in me.

"Thumbsucker" opens Sept. 16 nationwide.

"Côte D'Azur": A musical without music, a sex farce without judgment, a summer movie for fall
Fewer than five minutes into "Côte D'Azur," the handsome Parisian couple at its center (Gilbert Melki and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) are bonking in their creaky vacation-home bed like happy summer bunnies. A couple of minutes after that, their elfin androgynous son Charly (Romain Torres), who may or may not have sexual-identity issues, pleasures himself in the shower, and we pretty much know the universe we're in. Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's latest film is a lighter-than-air seaside concoction, a French bedroom farce no less classic for its modern preoccupation with who's gay and who isn't.

But really, in some sense that question isn't the point at all. You could argue that in Ducastel and Martineau's universe, nobody's ever quite sure who they are and what they're doing. If, because this works itself out in the realm of sexuality, the duo's thoroughly delightful films make some viewers uneasy, well, that's their loss. As Ducastel says over coffee in a SoHo hotel bar, "If you are a heterosexual guy, maybe you can't be completely comfortable with this film. Or you have to be a very, very heterosexual guy. We know some!"

Ducastel and Martineau are indeed a gay couple who both live together and make films together without murdering each other, which is certainly a momentous accomplishment. Inevitably their movies have been stereotyped as gay films for gay audiences, and while there's nothing wrong with that -- they tell me, in fact, that the market for French gay films in the United States is "very big" -- they're after something a lot more interesting, and more fun, than a tiresome empowerment agenda.

When I meet them during a brief New York stopover for the Tribeca Film Festival, Ducastel and Martineau are feeling a bit bruised by a French critic who has called them "the kind of homosexuals that think they should turn any heterosexual into a gay person," as Ducastel puts it. "This isn't our mission in life," he assures me. "We are very, very happy that there are heterosexual guys."

"Not even in the movie!" protests Martineau, whose general mode is to play the laconic wisecracker to his partner's straight man (you should pardon the expression). "There are absolutely, definitely straight people in the movie. So they are a little bit homophobic when they say that."

Maybe more than a little bit. Indeed, Béatrix, as played by the beautiful Bruni-Tedeschi -- whom you may have caught recently in François Ozon's "5x2" -- is as overly heterosexed as any female character in the recent history of French cinema. Fueled by the famously aphrodisiacal shellfish of the French Riviera, she rekindles the home fires with her hunky husband Marc (Melki), and stays busy on the side with her insatiable and persistent lover (the fine comic actor Jacques Bonnaffé).

But is Charly sleeping with his tan and slender buddy Martin (Edouard Collin), as Béatrix assumes and Marc fears? Why is Marc so interested in Charly and Martin's relationship anyway? And who is Marc's old flame, who shows up at a crucial juncture and turns the household upside down? Is Marc and Bétrix's love life just held together by the arousing power of all those oysters and mussels? (The French title of the film is "Crustacés et Coquillages," which is much funnier and more appropriate, but I guess doesn't translate well.)

The answers to these perplexing questions may surprise you, or perhaps not so much. But "Côte D'Azur" is a finely balanced piece of comedic machinery, full of slamming doors, inconveniently ringing cellphones and showers at inappropriate times of day. Unlike "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy," Ducastel and Martineau's masterpiece (and perhaps the only AIDS musical the world will ever see), this isn't a musical, but as they observe, it's constructed like one.

"We are of course entranced by Jacques Demy's movies," Ducastel says. "And for this one we thought about 'Lola,' which isn't a musical. I remember when I saw it I didn't know anything about it. I went into the theater and it started and I thought, 'Shit, it isn't a musical!' But at the end I realized it was one of the most perfectly musical of his movies."

"So this is not a musical," adds Martineau, "but we have a song during the opening credits, a song after half an hour, and we end it with a big musical number. Some musicals don't do that."

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