Jeune & Jolie

The French teenager Isabelle (Marine Vacth) is spending summer holiday with her middle-class family in the south of France and decides to lose her virginity with the German teenager Felix (Lucas Prisor). Then she returns to Paris with her mother Sylvie (Géraldine Pailhas), her stepfather Patrick (Frédéric Pierrot) and her younger brother Victor (Fantin Ravat).

Then Isabelle works as a call girl using the nickname Lea and meeting old men. She feels affection for her client Georges (Johan Leysen) that is married with a daughter. When Georges dies from a heart attack while having sex with Isabelle in a hotel, she flees but the police investigate and identifies her. The detectives in charge of the investigation disclose to Sylvie that is devastated. Isabelle quits prostitution, but once prostitute, forever prostitute.

"Jeune & Jolie" by François Ozon begins as a coming of age version of "Belle de Jour", where the lead character is attracted by money instead of by sexual fantasies. Even the poster recalls the one from Buñuel's masterpiece. Isabelle belongs to a middle-class family and does not have financial needs but despite of that, she is attracted by money. This is clear based on her reaction when her mother takes her money and when she explains to the police detective how she started to prostitute after receiving an offer from a stranger. Further, she is cold and seems to care only to her younger brother and Georges. When she loses her virginity with Felix, it seems to be part of her plan to explore her sexuality to make money. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Jovem e Bela" ("Young and Beautiful")

A young and beautiful girl sells her body to rich older men, lying about her age, and hiding it to her parents and friends. Until an unexpected event forces her to confront reality. The new film's subject from French director François Ozon is close to Julia Leigh's 2011 "Sleeping Beauty", but the treatment is quite different. Nothing is odd or strange here. We follow Isabelle's journey through the discovery of sexuality in a very realistic fashion, typical of Ozon's filmmaking.

The only trouble is that we are not troubled ! The script is so predictable that we get very few surprises throughout the film, and we do not care for Isabelle's fate at all. That's a shame considering the interesting subject.

The lack of explanation for her behavior is a good thing, we do not get the usual psychological/environment/parents syndrome, but this leads to a certain shallowness.

Actors do a fine number, especially the beautiful Marine Vacth, whom we should see again very soon, hopefully in a more rewarding role.

I really liked Ozon's last film (Dans la maison), but this one was a disappointment for me. It's hard not to see this story as a bunch of first world problems. But at its core, there are several good ideas and stories - and none of them gets the spotlight. The director goes from one subplot to the other, without really developing the characters, and seemingly has no idea what to do with this story. (And this makes the ending even worse.) But time to time, some settings or the actors' performance can tell us more than a thousand words.

Anyway, it's a thoughtful and basically a good movie, but it's too unfocused, unbalanced to go anywhere. If you haven't seen Dans la maison from Ozon, I'd recommend that one instead.

This film is incredibly slow and apathetic, but that's the beauty of it. Isabelle (Marine Vacth), a girl with a stable family who finds herself in a stable environment, is a strange creature. From what I've noticed, she only had a real connection with two people: her little brother and Alice (Charlotte Rampling). She decides to become a prostitute, even though she didn't need the money and could've had sex with any young guy, and her reasons to start doing such a thing aren't clear. François Ozon directed a film with a lot of million dollar questions.

From my personal perspective, she did it for the taste and the thrill provided by the sense of being independent, of doing something dangerous and morally wrong. Even though she felt somewhat disgusted and guilty for having sex with strange men, she kept doing it to, somehow, prove herself that she didn't need anyone's approval to do what she wanted to do - in this case, a dangerous and morally wrong thing. She probably didn't plan to tell anyone, but her family found out in a bad way. I see her as a rebel hearted girl who feels trapped in a cage (in her case, her mother, society, morality, a nice and stable life) and who's holding back her feelings because, if she let them out, they might be too overwhelming - that's why she so apathetic all the time. Or maybe she just couldn't care less about anyone because life is boring and we're gonna die.

I enjoyed the film. I enjoyed the photography, the scenarios, the actors, the language, etc. It's not an exciting production, though. It's the perfect movie to watch on a rainy Sunday, when there's nothing else to do.

A girl goes to the beach with her parents and younger brother. She loses her virginity to a boy she meets there. The experience is rather unsatisfying, so for some reason she becomes a high-class prostitute for middle-aged and elderly men.

It is a long-time convention of French cinema for young girls (often underage girls) to become sexually involved with older men. It might be a nod to the changing times that in films like this and "Student Services" and "Elles", they're now apparently getting paid for it at least. But while those other two French films (and the similar Eastern European film "A Call Girl") are about university students who resort to prostitution to pay for their studies, this is a younger girl who still lives with her parents, and her motives for selling her body are pretty opaque to say the least. Still, this film is perhaps less hypocritical than the others because while ALL these films contain more sex/nudity than is really necessary, this at least is a strange but singular story of one character and is not positing itself as a "problem" movie about how terrible it is that unbelievably sexy young girls are doing things like this--while, of course, SHOWING them doing things like this as much as possible.

This film is no better or worse than the aforementioned ones, but it is somewhat of disappointment coming as it does from auteur Francois Ozon. Ozon is perhaps most famous for "Swimming Pool", but he has actually made any number of interesting films like "Sitcom", "See the Sea", "Criminal Lovers", and even the murder-mystery musical "8 Women". Compared to those, this film is just horribly conventional. The actress Marine Vacth, a gorgeous former model, is obviously about five years older than her character, which is probably a good thing because even when she's not having graphic sex with the elderly, she's being spied on sunbathing topless, showering, or masturbating by the male members of her own family! Her performance is adequate, but really pales compared to the performance by Adele Exarchopolous in "La Vie d'Adele" (which this film competed against at Cannes last year). But then it's hard to give a believable performance when you aren't given a believable character.