Fat Girl

by Shari L. Rosenblum

In the revealingly mistitled Fat Girl, director Catherine Breillat once again conveys brilliant understatement in the guise of superficial shock, and effectively divides her audience by virtue of where they look.

Or perhaps it would be better to write, by virtue of when they avert their eyes, as there are shocks meant for all of us. I daresay no one can sit through this film without at least a passing discomfiture. If not harrowed by the repetitive, comparative, underage nudity or the ill-matched sonorities of pain and pleasure in extended seedy seduction, one is nonetheless likely haunted by the naked resignation of a young girl's self-awareness and the unnerving echo of a song of longing where the wishing does come true.

The characters within whom and upon whom all this plays out are two young girls at the edge of adolescence and the height of vulnerability: Anaïs, 12 years old and not quite popularly svelte (Anaïs Reboux in a remarkably believable performance), and her 15-year-old sister, Elena (Roxane Mesquida), with a perfectly standard beauteous shape. It is summer vacation time, and anxious for initiation into the rites of passage, both girls, as the cliché goes, are looking for love in all the wrong places.

The screenplay does not dawdle: opening with a child's eerily unchildlike song, the film takes us immediately to the girls in full motion, theorizing about the best ways to lose their virginity: Elena, imagining sex as love, and Anaïs believing detached sensuality an act of empowerment - "The first time," she resolves with uncynical matter-of-factness "should be with a nobody."

No sooner voiced than done, Elena in record speed, despite all requisite second-thinking, gives herself over to the uncannily accurate persuasions of a foreign law student/Lothario (Libero di Rienzo as Fernando), while Anaïs, wishing for sleep in the next bed, cannot help but wince at every bad line of his and every painful moan from the mouth of her sister, succumbed.

But in the daylight hours, the tables turn, and with the almost too obvious visual link between fellatio and gorging on a baguette, it is Elena who looks on with disgust as Anaïs engages in her own sensual subjugation, piling her plate high with potato salad, chewing endlessly on mock phallic sweets, and lathering herself with whipped lotion, before playing at being indecisive seductress alone in the water between alternate ways out.

Breillat's directorial hand is less a poet's than a polemicist's, her cinematic efforts more declarative than lyrical, and visual subtlety is not her strong suit (from banana splits to erect penises). But for all the blunt brutality of her sights, sounds and imagery, she somehow leaves her underlying message understated. It's not the male-bashing antipathy of which she's often accused, but an alternative feminist focus on women and the choices they make. Or the choices they make in becoming women. Reversing the Subject/Object societal structure that Simone de Beauvoir decried, Breillat's girls, like her women, are Subjects of their own. Male society (and not men, per se) is merely the setting through which they navigate: the absent father or distant lover; the caddish roué and the murderous rapist are not symbols of masculinity or icons of male identity, but merely the obstacles and confrontations among which some women choose their fates.

If the film's point of view is that of Anaïs, the Fat Girl of the English title, it becomes a cautionary, and somehow celebratory tale truly dedicated to both girls, in an irony captured only in the French : À ma soeur (For my sister).

Behind the shock, Breillat's latest export is a story of sisterhood. Of closeness unparalleled and envy unquenchable, of spiritual bonding and emotional resentments as something both familial and political, where gazing in the mirror together shows up the differences that would deny the commonalities. "Nobody would know we were sisters," the older girl says as the two compare their images in a looking-glass there is no getting through. "We hate each other because we are raised as rivals."

Unwilling witnesses each to the other's misindulgences, disdainful of each other's choices, Anaïs and Elena each contributes to the
other's ostensible ruin, while their mother, played by the compulsively overrated Arsinée Khanjian, pits them against each other and endangers them both spiritually and physically with her distracted self-centeredness.

This is a film that holds women responsible for themselves. . . and for their sisters . . and for their daughters . . . and does so with a bludgeoning force.

It is a powerful message. But, as Anaïs says in the very last frame, before the camera freezes on her defiant face, "Don't believe me if you don't want to."

Go and see it for yourself.

©2001 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene