A REAL YOUNG GIRL
directed by Catherine Breillat with Charlotte Alexander runs Sept. 7-13 at Grand Illusion
HOW CAN SOMETHING so explicit, so ostensibly shocking, be so boring? Catherine Breillat, the director of 1999’s lurid, unrated Romance, first tried her hand at filmmaking in 1975 with this tale of a precocious teenager whiling away a dull summer vacation by exploring her body, her fantasies, and the limits of those around her. Originally banned in France for its sexual content, Girl notably lacks the seething quality of Breillat’s later work, and while it creditably gets inside the mind—and the rest—of a real young girl, it drags. Excruciatingly long, slow, loaded shots reflect Alice’s profound ennui as she’s stuck in the country home of her fairly horrid parents; an interminable scene of her family’s teatime makes it believable when she relieves the tedium by penetrating herself with a teaspoon under the table. But after your surprise, you’re still bored—just like her.
Things heat up as Alice tries to actualize a crush on the burning-hot neighbor’s son, who provocatively works in his wife-beater at the sawmill. (The crotch shots of his jeans are hilarious.)
Meanwhile, Alice exercises her caprice by ignoring her harping mother and provoking her already creepily leering father, as the subtext is doled out with a shovel. She’s both object and objectifier, powerful in her new sexuality yet powerless; the camera watches her watching others as well as being watched. She’s both repulsed by and obsessed with her body, looking at herself in various stages of undress in the mirror. “I can’t accept the proximity of my face and my vagina,” she says, improbably, in voice-over.
In the end, unbridled teen lust begets tragedy, but, like Alice, we don’t much care.
