Sexy, cool, and French: liberated young actor Edouard Collin and the out gay couple behind the crowd-pleasing farce Cote d'Azur debate whether the French are just hipper about sexuality.

Edouard Collin is a tall wisp of a French teenager, all well-tanned Parisian sinew with a sharp-angled, warmly expressive face born to be placed in front of a camera. But while he was happily tackling the likes of Moliere onstage beginning at age 7, it wasn't until he was 17 that he auditioned for and landed his first film, Cote d'Azur, a souffle-light, sun-soaked sex farce written and directed by the team behind 2000's gay picaresque The Adventures of Felix. Due out September 9 from Strand Releasing, Cote d'Azur was shot in 2004 in and around Marseilles.

Collin plays Martin, an easygoing gay French teen with a soft crush on his straight best friend and a mind for mischief--the latter a quality he shares with Collin. "I have a lot of good memories [from the shoot]," says Collin, 18, speaking through a translator over a breakfast in West Hollywood, Calif., "but the funniest one is the scene in the shower when I was ..." At this point both Collin and translator fall silent as the young actor demonstrates the universal gesture for, well, masturbating.

"Actually, I think we were all a little bit nervous about that scene," says Cote d'Azur cowriter-director Jacques Martineau, 42, speaking in English over the phone from the Normandy getaway he shares with Olivier Ducastel, his professional partner and boyfriend for almost a decade. "We knew that we didn't want something very [explicit, but] it's always complicated to ask an actor to be naked. As everything went very well, I suppose it is a good memory for [Collin], because it's probably a big challenge for a very young actor."

That shower sees a lot of action over the course of the movie's lighthearted 90 minutes, and not just from the hormonal Martin and his best buddy, Charly, who has invited Martin on a family vacation along the Mediterranean. Both of Charly's parents, Marc (Gilbert Melki) and Beatrix (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), have their own sexually charged moments involving that steamy, glass-doored stall--but not with each other and certainly not after they've started to suspect that their son and Martin are an item.

In a way, the intimate friendship between Martin and Charly is the continuation of a story line Martineau and Ducastel began in their previous film, My Life on Ice, which concludes with a gay teenager confessing his love to his straight best friend. "We wanted to [examine] what can happen after that," says Ducastel, 43. "How can two teenagers, one gay, the other not, build a relationship when those things are in the air and clearly said? It seems to us, today, in France, you can meet teenagers who don't have any sex[ual] experience who are able to tell you that they are gay. It's very surprising, because I remember years ago I needed to experience sex with another guy to be able to say 'I'm gay.'"

From the start both Martineau and Ducastel thought Collin was perfect for the role of Martin. "When we saw the first tape [of his audition]," Martineau says, "we really thought he was absolutely great and so fresh. Before the third [screen] test we met him in a cafe, [and] we spoke a lot about the script. We found him really, really incredible and natural and beautiful. I decided he was obviously gay and so comfortable with that."

Well, not so fast. "Alors," Collin says calmly, "I still haven't decided. I don't know if I'm homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual. However, I am very open about [sexuality]. I don't know for the moment." (One thing is clear: Collin's a born flirt. When asked by this male reporter whether he is currently dating anyone, without missing a beat he wryly smiles and says, "Why, do you want to ask me out?")

Part of his cautiousness may stem from Collin's upbringing. He grew up living with his grandmother and mother and barely knew his father, whose death when Collin was 12, he says, plunged his mother into a drug-fueled depression. She moved out, and at 16 Collin moved out as well and into government-sponsored housing, a rift having more to do with typical adolescent friction with his overprotective grandmother, he maintains, than any issues with his open sexuality. After the film's Paris premiere last spring, Collin's grandmother told him she was very proud of him and the film--and warned him about being typecast as the "gay kid." While his next two film roles are straight characters, Collin is quick to mention that in October he will appear in Paris in the play Wild Heart as an insecure gay kid.

It's hard to quantify, but to an American there's something ineffably French about Collin's matter-of-fact attitude concerning his sexuality, and that goes double for Cote d'Azur, in which marital infidelity, park cruising, and adolescent crushes all lead to an upbeat finale that validates all kinds of coming out. The film certainly uses sex to spin its plot, but it treats the subject as just another aspect of life rather than as any Big Issue to be conquered. But don't tell that to the film's directors or its young star.

"I don't like saying that it's different in France than it is elsewhere or different in America than it is elsewhere," says Collin. "I think [attitudes about sexuality are] a question of personality. It depends on who the person is."

"I don't know if it's so French, because there's some people in France who think that [the film is] too optimistic or idealized," agrees Ducastel. Sex, he says, "is not so easy for the French. You can find people in France who will say, like Americans, '[The film] is not realistic. People are not like that. You show very special characters.' Yes, it's very special characters, but maybe more people should be like that."

Collin was unfazed by the film's content, even when Martin goes cruising along the rocky wooded coast and briefly chases after a hot 40-something plumber. "I've never felt the need to go to those places," he says, pausing. "But I can take you if you want!"

Vary also writes for Entertainment Weekly.