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.

At the NY Film Festival's Q&A with Breillat, she expressly forbid seeing "Fat Girl" (as she prefers to call it) as a morality play. She eluded any attempts to draw her into conclusions about her film, insisting that she is not a moralist.

What is clear from the questions she asks, however, is that she views sex with a certain contempt, especially as regards the male role in the act. The men that are in the film are either insensitive, duplicitous or murderous. Breillat's intent is to show how adrift any adolescent girl is when it comes to sexuality and to somehow convey that to an adult audience. She counseled young Anais during filming by saying, "We are making a film that I don't even think you can see when it is done, but it is not for you. It is supposed to scare adults."

Well, I am not sure why director made the decisions she did regarding the last 15 minutes of the film. She seems to have taken a page out of Claude Chabrol's textbook, which may have been a good thing but here it feels rather forced. The film seems to be a "Last Tango in Paris" for teenagers, as a young man from Italy takes up with a French girl who has a love/hate relationship with her fat sister (the title character). As Brando did with Maria Schidner, the Italian guy uses the word 'love' to exploit the girl sexually. The good acting makes the film work, until the part I have qualms. I am not sure the credit fully belongs to the director, but like Larry Clark's "Kids," the result is a profound statement about the cruelty of adolescence. We certainly empathize with the title character, and therefore it is harder to accept certain aspects of this film. The film is one of several French films in recent years with a brutal, pessimistic tone, including "The Dreamlife of Angels" and "demonlover." This film is far better than the director's awful mess "Romance." I can see why some people either really admired or loathed this film. Objectively, no one can take away from the great acting and solid cinematography and for that reason I choose to give it 3 stars as opposed to 2 and a half.

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.

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.