William Russell finds out

more about the off-beat director of the movie Sitcom

FRANCOIS Ozon could give George Clooney or Tom Cruise a run for their money in the male pulchritude stakes any time, except that he tried to be an actor, found it did not suit his demons, and retired behind the camera instead. ''I wanted to be an actor, but I realised I was very bad at it,'' he says. ''I am a voyeur not an exhibitionist, so acting was not for me. I felt I had all these demons inside me, which I could express through the camera while hiding myself behind it.''

The screen's loss is the screen's gain because, while pretty actors are two-a-penny, gifted directors are harder to come by and, on the evidence of his first feature, Sitcom, as well as the short films which preceded it, the charming Ozon will be a force to be reckoned with in French cinema for some time to come. Sitcom is a black farce about what happens to one of those glossy television families after father, a conceited lawyer, brings home a pet rat. The beast proceeds to exert a baleful influence on all who come within sight - his wife, son, and daughter included. There is no point in spoiling the joke, but also involved are the cleaning lady, a luscious Spaniard, her boyfriend, who turns out to be sexually ambivalent and is the last person to have been dispatched to deal with the son, who has just come out of the closet, and the daughter's butch boyfriend, who gets the hots for the cleaning

lady. The film, which opens with a death, ends with one, and is very funny indeed.

French humour sometimes has problems in making the Channel crossing - Josiane Berard's Gazon Maudit, shown here as French Twist, was one notable victim - but Ozon's carry-on movie may prove more to our taste. He is well aware of the problem, but hopes he has defeated it.

He is a calculating chap, Ozon. Born in Paris in 1967, he graduated with a Master's degree in cinema, studied at film school, and subsequently made several short films shown at festivals around the world. They include A Summer Dress, about a schoolboy who meets a girl on the beach, makes love to her, and then has to go home wearing a dress, and See the Sea, at 67 minutes a fairly long short. In it a young woman living alone with a baby by the seaside - husband is in the city - lets a passing backpacker set up her tent on the lawn with deadly results.

He says he made a conscious decision to be different when he selected the subject for his debut feature film. There had been lots of socially aware, violent films, while others had come up with rites of passage stories, in most of which an older woman teaches the boy about sex. His

tuppence-coloured comedy, deliberately anarchic, controversial, and designed to shock, breaks all sorts of taboos while displaying a sure directorial hand.

Oddly, the sitcom, although familiar enough on British and American television, is less so in France where, he says, they are usually very bad, something he has tried

to copy with the opening

of his film. As to what inspired the idea, he says rather alarmingly that it was his own family. He thought making it would be ''therapeutic for myself''.

He made Sitcom as he

would have made a short film. It was cheap to do, filmed within a month on one location, and everyone took part on the basis of the

hoped-for box office and a minimum wage. He hopes that now they will get a decent return, since it has been a hit in France.

''Audiences there were shocked,'' he says in unrepentant tones. ''The French prefer serious things, and do not like irony. They accept it from other countries but not their own.

''I made it to amuse myself, and because I wanted to avoid the cult of the first film. Too much gets put on to a first film. I just wanted to enjoy myself with the actors.''

Ozon became interested in cinema because his father had a Super 8 camera and used to film the family holidays. ''One day I took it and said - I will film now, and I carried on,'' he says. ''I invented little stories, then I went to film school, it was all quite natural.''

And should anybody feel like complaining about the scene in which the boyfriend, who has been abandoned by the daughter of the house, now a paraplegic, is discovered by the cleaning lady in a state of undress and arousal, be advised.

Seeing is not believing. What you see is a fake. Perhaps Ozon is not so shocking after all.