SEX IS COMEDY

[] (Three stars)

In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 92 minutes. Not rated (nudity, sex). At the Film Forum, Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue. Through Nov. 2.

‘SEX Is Comedy” is a pleasant change of pace for French director Catherine Breillat, who is notorious for films featuring sick sex – like “Anatomy of Hell,” which opened Friday to mostly negative reviews.

A variation on Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” “Sex Is Comedy” is a semi-fictionalized account of the shooting of the scene in Breillat’s “Fat Girl” in which a teen loses her virginity.

Anne Parillaud is Jeanne, the filmmaker fashioned after Breillat, who must sweet-talk her actors – who despise each other – into putting their souls into the scene.

Roxane Mesquida, a dark-haired beauty with a Bardot pout, reprises her role from “Fat Girl” while Gregoire Colin, who wasn’t in the original, plays the actor who’s to seduce her on screen.

The actor, who must wear a huge plastic penis during the lovemaking, is the more difficult for Jeanne to deal with.

“If I don’t keep my socks on [during the sex scene], I think I’ll die,” he whines to the director at one point.

Delightful performances are given by all, especially Parillaud, who made a name for herself as the lead in Luc Besson’s “La Femme Nikita.”

“Sex Is Comedy” features male and female nudity and a sweaty love scene, but it comes nowhere near the raunchy sex Breillat is known for.

Rather, it’s a sweet and light-hearted endeavor that shows Breillat isn’t a one-trick pony.