Item #: 5062DVD Category: FRENCH Format: DVD MPAA Rating: X

Woolly Rating: 5/10 (42 votes)

MEMBER COMMENTS ON THIS VIDEO

jd	Oct 14, 2002 @ 18:57:28

<[:-\ i’m a prude?
!!!SPOILER ALERT!!! this film has a 72% rating on the tomatometer, a thumbs up from richard roeper, and 3 ½ stars from roger ebert. save for a lot of sophisticated dialogue and some sisterly interaction, this is an extremely blunt and unpleasant exploitation film, albeit one with very high production values. the plot is: young girl has sex, fat little sister watches, girl gets caught, and then gets murdered in a random attack. now i know why roman polanski picked france to flee to. this film couldn’t have been made in america. the girls, elena, 15 and anais, 12, are, as far as i can find out, played by actresses that age. they both have other credits. elena is eurobait, with very mature but flirtatious dress, makeup, and behavior. the obese anais alternates between mature talk and childishness. she eats constantly, with a disturbing, infantile enjoyment. the film opens with them talking about losing their virginity. the twelve year old says she wants it to be with someone she doesn’t care for, a theme that returns twice in the film. they argue which one could pick a man up. seconds later they arrive at a cafe where elena immediately picks up fernando, an italian college student, necking with him after in less than a minute. she takes him home to mom and dad and behaves possessively, saying she is going to put him on a diet (they are eating macaroni and cheese). mom and dad, upper middle class, are only slightly curious as to what he’s doing there. fernando and elena tryst in the sister’s shared room, since she can’t get out of the gated holiday “residence” for french people in italy. (i guess. the signs are all in french, but they have a 1,000 mile plus drive back to a paris suburb.) i think this is to show that middle class “secure” dwellings aren’t. elena thinks she’s in love, and engaged. there is nothing to explain this instantaneous delusion. anais is smarter. having to witness the trysts, each of them, even one outdoors, almost crushes her, driving her deeper into compulsive eating, but she continues to analyze like a 30 year old, and prop up her sister emotionally. elena is shown in lengthy full frontal nudity and groped in soft core sex scenes. anais is shown topless twice, revealing that she is still very much a child physically. fernando’s mother accosts the sister’s mother (never named, played by atom egoyan favorite arsinee khanjian). she wants her “mauve opal” ring back. it seems every summer fernando gives her jewelry as engagement rings to young girls. her only concern is getting them back. mom, who had seemed extraordinarily permissive up to this point, abruptly drives the girls back to france, saying dad, who had left early, wanted elena “examined.” her behavior is cold and lacking any detectable nurturing, parental quality. twice, its been set up that its a long drive. mom stops the car at a truck stop parking lot to sleep. a man bashes in the front passenger window and bludgeons elena to death. he chokes mom to death. anais just sits doe eyed in the back seat. finally she gets out of the car, but instead of immediately running, she gazes into the killer's eyes. she finally runs, and is raped fairly graphically. the final scene is the cops bagging up mom and elena. they pull anais out of the woods. one cop says she insists she hasn’t been raped. anais pouts and says something like “don’t you believe me?” its clear the director, catherine breillat, intended to imply that anais had gotten the deflowering she had idealized. you have to see this film to grasp how bluntly all this and everything else is presented. there seems to be an intentional lack of character development, especially in the adults. mom and dad are never named. i had assumed the sisters would be played by adult women, as is, as far as i know, still the convention, even in france. its easy to argue free speech for movies about teen sex, but i wouldn’t have intentionally rented a movie that required a girl that young to do the things she had to do to make it. i do agree with roeper that its a film that no one that watches it is likely to forget soon.

Fat Headed
Catherine Breillat herself, and those who profess to admire her, proclaim her a 'provocatur.' Which is all well and good if her films had something else going for them. But Breillat's voyeuristic studies show little more to me than the same juvenile fascination that an immature 12-year-old has for looking under rocks and smashing worms. This boring, vacuous 'examination' of the discomforts of being fat, adolescent and sexually ignorant is more interested in being cruel to its central subject and its audience. Instead of a truly enlightening study of adolescence, we get a 'fat girl' who is nothing but a Bressonian empty cipher. The movie really isn't about her, despite the title. It seems to be more about Breillat seeing if she can get away with showing underage actors having nude simulated sex--and of course it is all capped off by a fashionably senseless violent finale. I'm not sure what it tells us about French filmmakers that they have to constantly remake 'The 400 Blows" ad nauseum; it seems like half the films that come out of France and Quebec every year have to do with adolescent sexual awakening. Which provides us all the amusing spectacle several times a year of watching every film critic turn into amateur psychologists as they try to attribute all sorts of significance to these things, trotting out the standard battery of stock analyses: "A perceptive study of the pain of adolescent sexual awakening and discovery" and such rot repeated ad infinitum. Breillat enters the shock value hall of fame alongside other Euro-bore provocateurs like Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noe and the makers of 'Baise Moi'--all more interested in pissing off viewers in the short term than having their films remembered and loved 50 years from now. Bring on the Warner Pre-Codes, now! * Fat Girl (2001) - reviewed 2005 Kevin Rayburn

FRENCH SEX AND VIOLENCE
Since this French release from director Catherine Breillat contains BOTH a fairly graphic sex scene between an underage girl and her older boyfriend AND a seemingly gratutious very violent conclusion, one could just about guarantee a negative reaction from most viewers. These two scenes overwhelm what is supposed to be the central theme of the movie, i.e. the complex relationship between two adolescent sisters, one 15 and beautiful, the other 13, homely and obese. The rather vulgar American title makes it seem as if the film concerns only the more unattractive younger sister. The original title of TO MY SISTER is somewhat ambiguous in the sense that the film could be viewed both as a sort of homage from the surviving girl to her murdered sister or perhaps as an examination of director Breillat's relationship with HER sister. How much of the film is autobiographical and how much pure fiction, I can't say, but Breillat says in an interview that her films "are her." The two teens are shown giggling and cuddling one minute and calling each other "slut" and "whore" the next--in other words, like most teen sisters everywhere. When the older one decides to lose her virginity to a twenty something Italian student on vacation in France, the younger sister is forced to confront her own budding sexuality. Since the girls sleeep in the same room (but not the same bed), the sex act takes place with the younger sister watching while pretending to be asleep. But Breillat, eschewing all sentimentality, conceives of this as a lust scene as opposed to a love scene. And here is where Breillat goes over the line of decency, many would say. The girl changes her mind at the last minute but her older boyfriend succeeds in persuading her that anal sex is not "real" sex and that she can prove her love by performing this act. He also askes her to perform oral sex on him. This one scene (shot in a single take)consumes at least 18-20 minutes of an 83 minute film. Now, there must be at least a half dozen French films since 1960 to explore this area of adolescent sexuality. Even for a country where the age of consent is 14 or 15, and where bare breasts are hardly regarded as nudity, this scene is still disturbing in its frankness. (Incidentally, it is highly likely that the non-professional actors are several years older than the characters they portray.)Equally disturbing is the final scene wherein the older sister and mother are murdered and the younger sister is raped but survives. Where Breillat errs is in trying to make some profound connection between this act of violence and the action that has preceeded it. The shrinks have told us for decades that sex and violence are intimately related, of course, but this sledgehammer blow is totally unnecessary and unconvincing. One feels that Breillat, like so many intellectuals, intended to be wise and profound. The result, however, is merely shocking.

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