Sitcom

Sitcom (1998) is François Ozon's debut feature, a pitch-black satire you can watch online on iFILM. A comfortable Paris family starts to fall apart the very day the father carries home a white laboratory rat.

On the surface it's a model bourgeois household: roomy house, polite dinners, everything in its place. The caged rodent seems to do nothing — yet everyone who picks it up sheds a mask. The son comes out as gay and turns the home into an open house, the daughter rules from a wheelchair after a fall down the stairs, the mother fixates on her own child, and the father simply watches the chaos unfold for as long as he can. Across a tight 80 minutes, a cosy family comedy mutates into something far stranger.

Ozon is mocking the idea of the respectable family and the sitcom format itself — hence the title. This is the early, brazen, deliberately provocative Ozon, years before Swimming Pool and 8 Women. It is not a film for everyone: viewers who expect tasteful European arthouse will find their assumptions turned inside out. Stream Sitcom (1998) online on iFILM.