Fat Girl

Catherine Breillat, what goes on in your head. I liked a lot of this movie, for many of the same reasons as 36 fillette: realism, emotional honesty, unsentimentality about adolescent sexuality. For me, that is a good project; I like people to fuck up our notions of what sex is in cinema and life, as long as it doesn’t cross over into exploitation, and I really don’t feel that Breillat does.

That said, the ending ruined it all for me. Not from the very moment of sudden, out-of-nowhere violence, which I suppose could be criticized as being poorly motivated, an example of a director who doesn’t know how to finish her film, but that’s not my criticism. In a film like this, plot issues don’t bother me much. I was cautiously willing to go along with it. It was ruined for me at the rape scene, or the per-Anais not rape scene, because she wanted it and she liked it and you can believe her or not that’s your business. Mad No 13-year-old watches her mother and sister be brutally murdered then anticipates and enjoys sex in the woods with the killer. Not unless she is some intense psychopath – and sure, aww, adolescence is hard, but that the film doesn’t support. I’m willing to be taken to dark places but I guess I’ve found the line beyond which I cannot cross. That destroys everything I liked about the film, and Breillat’s work, in an instant. Honesty and realism this film lacks in profusion.

Now what to rate this, what to think of Breillat? Watched the two interviews on the Criterion disc and found her to be immensely well-spoken, very insightful, arrogant sure but not a pompous academic. Fascinated by a lot of what she had to say (frustrated that she had next to nothing to say about the ending). Well apart from this and the low rating I suppose I must give the film I remain very interested in what she does…