Modern Romance

By RICHARD CORLISS

This is a declaration of love: The Opposite of Sex is the smartest, edgiest, most human and handsomely acted romantic comedy in elephant years. It's got enough plot, in 100 spiky minutes, for an entire season of Melrose Place (if that show were totally weird and funny). It has two births, two deaths, five sexual affairs and no special effects. Writer-director Don Roos' film also has a gnarled wisdom about modern romance, straight and gay, that makes it a road-movie Chasing Amy, a Heathers for the whole postnuclear family.

The film offers seven characters in search of a spanking. The main miscreant is Dedee (Christina Ricci), 16-year-old tornado-park trash from Louisiana. Think of all the black widows and blond minxes from old film noir, give them the mouth of a Quentin Tarantino tough, and you have Dedee--not only in your face but down your throat. In the film's first 15 minutes, she desecrates her stepfather's grave, runs away from home with her one-testicled boyfriend, dumps him to visit her gay half brother, seduces his boyfriend and declares she's pregnant. To top it off, Dedee is the movie's narrator: a man eater who in other films would be gazed at and gossiped about, but here gets to tell us what we need to know. At least she's honest about herself. "I don't have a heart of gold," she says at the start. "And I don't grow one later, O.K.?" More than O.K., because Ricci embodies her with a brazenly unsentimental sass.

Here's a quick rundown. Bill (Martin Donovan), Dedee's half brother, has been nursing himself through mourning for his recently dead lover by romping with dishy, semidim Matt (Ivan Sergei), who may also be seeing the queeny Jason (Johnny Galecki). Dedee too has an old boyfriend (William Scott Lee) who keeps getting in the way. The only one not having sex is Lucia (Lisa Kudrow), Bill's neighbor and his dead lover's sister. And the only "normal" guy around is...Lyle Lovett. As we say, it's complicated.

The richest, strangest creature is Lucia, a twisted spinster who loves gay men (most especially her dead brother) with the desperation and security of caring for someone who can never accept her and thus never reject her. She thinks of herself, of course, as the one normal person. "You have a death wish," she tells Bill. "That's so selfish. I have one too, but I direct it toward others." Lucia could be just comedy's favorite device, the useful fool, but Kudrow makes her funny and sympathetic. Her body language is eloquent--she walks like a constipated stork when her arms and tight lips aren't folded in disapproval of the whole rotten world. Attend to the pain in Lucia's eyes and then to the bloom of sexual radiance when she finds a man who says the magic words, "Look for me in any crowded room. And I'll do likewise."

Formally playful and abubble with naughty wit, The Opposite of Sex is that rare grownup movie on the summer landscape. As Lucia says, "This is how we do things on the planet Maturia. We have much to teach you." Today's lesson: pay fond attention to these seven characters, who finally realize they are in search of one another. Somehow they will teach and touch you.