FAT GIRL
written and directed by Catherine Breillat with AnaﳠReboux and Roxane Mesquida opens Nov. 23 at Harvard Exit
TWELVE YEARS OLD and fat, Anaﳠ(AnaﳠReboux) is no AnaﳠNin; the extent of her sexual experience is bearing unwilling witness to the deflowering of her selfish, vain, lovely 15-year-old sister (Roxane Mesquida) by an unspeakably creepy Italian law student (Libero de Rienzo) on their family vacation in the south of France. Director Catherine Breillat has outdone herself here: Unlike the calculated affronts of her 1999 Romance, with its stilted, self-conscious foray into the sexually explicit, Fat Girl is a brilliant, traumatic, yet paradoxically slow movie that lashes out suddenly with perverse beauty or absolute ugliness.
The fat girl is pointedly the least monstrous in her picture-perfect family; she is the object of her sister’s derision and manipulation, ridiculed at the dinner table. But Anaﳠis also precocious, perceptive, and honest (when anyone bothers to ask). This, of course, does not save her from a particularly French loneliness and despair. She sings macabre, existential little songs to herself while swimming in the pool (“After my death, I’ll still be bored”) and weeps silently at the wrongs of her world. Her sister, Elena, is her nemesis and her only friend; in a striking scene they have a conversation—philosophical on Anaﳧ part, merely mean on Elena’s—about how different they are, how they simultaneously love and loathe each other so much. It ends with them in giggling fits about their mutual hatred.
There is humor here, in Anaﳧ sudden, succinct summations of her world and in the ludicrous lines deployed by her sister’s seducer, but it quickly degrades into horror in a world where, as their mother puts it, “people are pigs.” Breillat’s creeping camera and protracted scenes render everything beautiful and sinister at once: Anaﳠin her lime-green swimsuit bathed in the reflected light of the pool; the long scene of her sister’s increasingly disturbing seduction; a miserable family car trip. The acting is little short of superb. Elena is the portrait of sullen, self-involved adolescent beauty. The parents are a study in the grown-up coupling of oblivion and tension. Anaﳧ responses to her world have the inevitability of real life.
The inevitable, we come to realize, is a vicious, cruel shock that Fat Girl only obliquely portends. This sudden coda engenders a loss of innocence, both on-screen and off, that is rare in cinema. It is utterly horrifying.
