Anaïs is twelve and bears the weight of the world on her shoulders. She watches her older sister, Elena, whom she both loves and hates. Elena is fifteen and devilishly beautiful. Neither more futile, nor more stupid than her younger sister, she cannot understand that she is merely an object of desire. And, as such, she can only be taken. Or had. Indeed, this is the subject: a girl's loss of virginity. And, that summer, it opens a door to tragedy.
13 Nov Fat Girl (2001)
Sets Us Aside
Brellliat 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 happing 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.
Brellliat 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 Brellliat 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 realise that because you are watching, you are part of the damage she sketches.
Posted in 2005
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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