259 Fat Girl

[tavernier]

Without question one of the most tasteless, emotionally childish, smug pieces of drivel I've ever seen.

Breillat would love you!

[Lino]

Without question one of the most tasteless, emotionally childish, smug pieces of drivel I've ever seen.

Breillat would love you!

And by far the best first post by any member on this forum ever. Bravo.

[s.j. bagley]

Personally, I thought it was quite well done and it's a shame that it's one of so few films by women directors that the Criterion Collection have released.

[cana7cl]

Whoa! This chandler boy is a real film critic!

[domino harvey]

Did his post need more idiotic ax murders to sate you or what

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

I personally felt he saved himself a lot of time with a one sentence review.

Seriously, he went right for the meat.

[colinr0380]

Looking at the film again over the weekend I would disagree with the idea that the ending is just a middle finger up to the audience (though it works in that way too!) - it could also be a comment on the need for tidy resolutions in a film, especially following on from a situation we have been watching where the loss of the beautiful girl's virginity is an event that cannot really pay off in a fashion that is realistic while at the same time ending in a way that stays closer to the state of mind of the girls, for whom this event might seem like the end of the world.

Could it not be argued that the 'twist' ending elevates the sexually awakening sister/distracted parents plot that seems almost a mundane kind of everyday event and unemphasised in its filmic execution into a more metaphorical area and beyond just being another 'issue of the week' drama?

It could also suggest the way that minor events can suddenly take on a huge importance if they indirectly lead to greater tragedies - such as causing someone to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But in the end it is Anaïs's story. I like the way that the final scene can be viewed in many different ways: as the attacker having been willed into existence as a kind of twisted facilitator (as mentioned earlier in the thread) by a girl upset, and maybe jealous, of the attention both the boy and her parents having been paying to her sister (even if they are both rather negative attentions). It makes me wonder whether the attacker was real (in the context of the film), whether he was a deus ex machina on Breillat's part to give Anaïs what she might secretly have wished for, or whether it was a pure creation on her part to allow her to kill them herself, something that might explain her passive reaction to the situation in the back seat of the car, as well as her being frozen in terror.

I prefer the idea that the attacker is a 'twisted facilitator' added to the film in order to give Anaïs the unloving loss of virginity that she had suggested that she wanted earlier in the film and the irony of such a wish becoming literal combined with all the manipulative relationships she has been witness to throughout the film (maybe the only relationships she has seen have been twisted in some way, just as the parent's marriage seems cold and uncaring) either breaks her or in a strange way empowers her. Maybe both - the way she manages to shock the attacker in the midst of his assault on her by embracing him could suggest either and it is very important that we see the encounter in the verge and the way she consciously or not turns the tables on her attacker. To remove that scene from the UK version, which jumps from the attacker dragging her to the ground to Anaïs being brought from the bushes by the police, might make the scene less uncomfortable to watch but ironically it turns it into a violation in which Anaïs is purely the victim.

It might be unsubtle (though I think that is the point, contrasting with the muted, long takes of earlier in the film) but the way the shock ending allows for all these different interpretations, from the middle finger to the audience to the idea of transcendence seems to prevent it from being so easily dismissed as just a cynical trick.

Though I get the feeling that mine may be a minority opinion!

[zedz]

Though I get the feeling that mine may be a minority opinion!

I sort of agree with you, reading the film's conclusion as Anais's writing her own (petulant, vengeful) ending to the story, this being sealed by her frozen gaze at the camera / us in the last shot (if you don't like it, tough: it's my story). I can't remember the last line, but I think it's something like "if you don't believe it, I don't care."

However, I'm not certain that this is Breillat's intention. It certainly wasn't in the first version of the film with its added final scene (which greatly reduces that ambiguity). Given the tendentiousness of many of her other films, the ambiguity of the ending of this one may well be unintended.

[colinr0380]

I can't remember the last line, but I think it's something like "if you don't believe it, I don't care."

"Don't believe me if you don't want to" - which is quite an ambiguous statement, both suggesting as you say her defiance in a kind of 'who cares what interpretation you put on it' attitude that I think compares to the way we might have previously written off her sister as simply being 'slutty', but also "I was raped, but I know you aren't that bothered either way"

However, I'm not certain that this is Breillat's intention. It certainly wasn't in the first version of the film with its added final scene (which greatly reduces that ambiguity). Given the tendentiousness of many of her other films, the ambiguity of the ending of this one may well be unintended.

I agree that the deleted scene in the hospital reduces the ambiguity - but that is why it was deleted! Another example of a scene considered for a film and then correctly abandoned could be the potential ending to Cronenberg's Videodrome involving Max Renn being reunited with Nicki in another dimension after he shoots himself. It might have been an interesting idea and would have provided some bizarre imagery but it would also have destroyed the amazing ambiguity that simply ending with the sound of the gunshot opens up.

I've found all of Breillat's films that I have seen ambiguous, however much they flirt with supposed naturalism. It could be argued that Romance takes place all in the main character's head because while the events may occur we are much more focused on her reaction to them and what being tied up for example means to her, not just that she is being tied up - there are a few obvious fantasy sequences but even in the real world things are changed by being so tied to one point of view. Even though Fat Girl seems surprisingly naturalistic for much of the time we are so almost myopically tied to Anaïs's point of view of her sister's deflowering that there is no opportunity to judge the events from any other perspective.

I previously posted that I found Breillat's films quite difficult to stand in their attitude to men because of that emphasis on the mostly female lead characters (leading me to feel that the male characters were facilitators, either through good or bad action or inaction). It seemed as if the films were subscribing to a stereotypical view of men as a simple shorthand. However Anatomy of Hell was the breakthrough for me in telling the male lead character's story but keeping his voiceover female - it felt as if that was saying 'I can't pretend to speak authoritatively with a male voice so I will honestly portray that through keeping the voiceover female'. It felt as if that could be moved over to the more two dimensional characterisations of the supporting characters in the other films and instead of being meant to act as a wider comment on issues of 'men', 'sex', 'family' (or even 'filmmaking' in Sex Is Comedy) they instead acted more as an example of how internal the films are and how everything in the films from the environment (Anaïs's courting of the swimming pool ladders, the threatening trucks) to the events that occur, to the people surrounding the main character were all, not totally orchestrated exactly (though that could apply to Rocco Siffredi's wooden, almost possessed performance in the ghostly Anatomy of Hell and the obvious actors being manipulated by the director in Sex Is Comedy) but are acting in a way defined by the perspective of the main character and not with much independent will of their own.

I'm not at all sure about Breillat's films containing controversy just for their own sake. In a strange way I think the explicit imagery is meant to react with the skewed worldviews of the main characters as if witnessing the imagery is a trigger for sending them into a more unreal world - it is the hardcore punctuation of a fake scenario (and even the hardcore itself can sometimes be revealed as a trick and 'fake' - for example the prosthetic penis in Sex Is Comedy - and by association Fat Girl! - and the 'body double' for Amira Casar in Anatomy of Hell).

I'm not sure if that made any sense (Don't believe me if you don't want to! ) but I think ambiguity with regard to the lead character (while the surrounding characters are almost comically two dimensional: the classical harried mother, the slutty sister, the workaholic absent father, the sweet talking clean cut lothario, the dirty unshaven animalistic attacker) is present in many Breillat films and is the reason why I don't feel comfortable agreeing with the idea that the early part of Fat Girl is 'realistic' and then we get a cheap shock - it is more complex than that, and maybe asks us to consider why we accept some cliches of relationships more easily than others.

[domino harvey]

Announced for Blu. In related news, there is no God

[colinr0380]

I promise to attempt to resist trying unsuccessfully to explain the ending again during the upcoming inevitable roundelay of annoyance at the film!

EDIT (24th April 2011): I've just posted this in the packaging thread as it came up whilst we were talking about the film there, but I thought I'd put it here to for ease of reference:

There is actually an excellent short film, The Girl and the Almond from 1996 which is extremely reminiscent of Fat Girl: the passive-aggressive family confrontations around the dining table (although more violent in this case, with the father slapping his daughter, causing the mother to leave the holiday home early with the kids); a swimming pool scene; a scene by the sea; the Breillat-esque philosophical/yearning/miserablist voiceover from the teenage girl; the naked examination in the mirror - even the mother driving her kids back home getting surrounded and intimidated by, this time, a motorcycle gang while the daughter in the back seat seems more interested by them.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

"In a film which unabashedly exposes everything, Breillat hides a most painful loss of innocence" - This Recording tries to make sense of the movie.

[aox]

bluray.com

[Matt]

Book-length interview with Breillat forthcoming from Semiotext(e)