À ma soeur !

Brelliat drives me a little crazy. She is an observer of one small corner of life and seems incidentally a filmmaker. You get different editions of her observations on the distance of young sex across which we throw ropes.

So the question is which is the best and whether each one that follows adds something new, worthwhile.

The best to my mind was "A Real Young Girl" of thirty years ago. It had an honesty that everything subsequently lacks. By this I mean you could feel the filmmaker's emotions quite apart from whatever was happening on screen.

What we have here are two scenes. The first is hugely promising: a pretty girl loses her virginity while witnessed by her much younger sister. Drawn out circling of the boy. Set up in a way that we share in the discomfort as witness and some of the charm of the situation. We are seducer, voyeur, victim.

Brelliat knew this well enough to build a whole different movie about the nature of this voyeurism, "Sex is Comedy." You need to see the two together to get the folding.

The problem with Brelliat is that she has these emotional insights and she can pose scenes. But she has no skill at all in seeing the larger shape of the narrative. She doesn't understand the long form and the structure of a story. Lacking this, we get only scenes, and here we have only two. The second one is brutal, as if the first demanded the second.

The only thing to recommend this is the effect you get from watching the first scene. You quickly realize that because you are watching, you are part of the damage she sketches.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

This film is a necessary act of violation on its viewers. A pure, lethal injection of dramatic suffering which is beautifully rendered but left me feeling devastated by its intensity. Breillat is a director who has already made shock-waves with her last film "Romance". In her latest piece of disturbing cinematic violence, she takes us inside the life of a 13 year old overweight girl inside an average, upper middle-class family. On a holiday away with this family, we experience her exposed difference as her 15 year old sister begins to experiment with sex, often with her young sister a passive spectator. The parents are indifferent creatures, affected mainly by social pressures and appearances. Unaware - or possibly simply disinterested - in their daughters lives, they miss the painful undersides of the two girls forced closeness. Breillat offers more explicit sex, erections, and some extremely gruelling violence. I recommend this film but its intelligence and emotional truth is, necessary.

This is a film that is difficult to say you "liked." It gives a view of the different facets of cruelty. Anais (the "Fat Girl" of the title) is buffeted with cruelty and indifference at every turn--that directed toward her and that she witnesses. Her corpulence is both an attempt to insulate herself against these assaults but at the same time, indicative of her internalization of them. But ultimately, the film is similarly an assault on the viewer, be warned. It stings.

Moviezone Award Jury rapport 2002 - Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat)

The winning film amongst three fantastic films has got to be a very special feature. Catherine Breillat showed the jury the world of two sisters which do not only differ in the physical aspect of their characters but also have their own very distinctive expectations and desires when it comes to their first time having sex. The bond between the sisters is portrayed very well, the girls and the life they live are very recognizable. When you are watching the film you forget you are watching actresses when they flawlessly get across very strong and personal emotions in a very subtle manner. The observations of the fat girl show precisely how she encounters her sisterhood; her negative self-image and the absurd fascination for her sister. The strong hand of the director and the personal theme makes Fat Girl a film which will be remembered for a long time and which will be the subject of many discussions.

Somehow this film picked up the English title 'A Fat Girl'. How inappropriate, I thought, because for most of the film, the romance of the elder, more attractive sister takes center-stage. It is only at the end, after some horrible things have happened, that it becomes clear that the film has been leading us to understand the fat sister Anais's strange reaction to what happened to her. I have read criticism of the violence late in the film, as not having flowed out of what has gone before. Such criticism misses the point of the movie, I think, which is about the contrast between Anais's first sexual experience and the lovely Elena's, and Anais's acceptance of rape as being preferable to being in love with the boy, as Elena had been, when we and Anais watched Elena's first intercourse.

I thought the acting in this film wonderful, and Anais Reboux, as the fat girl is an outstanding find. This is a touching film, with real characters with whom to empathize, especially the two girls, both young and romantic, one with a saving touch of cynicism.