You Call This Romance?

Fat Girl

Dir.: Catherine Breillat

NR, 93 min.

Opening Friday at the Belcourt

If nothing else, Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl is a great argument starter. Beginning with her 1968 novel A Man for the Asking, a Marguerite Duras-inspired stream-of-consciousness meditation on a sexual encounter between a teenage girl and middle-aged man, the French novelist/screenwriter/director has consistently followed two preoccupations: girls’ coming of age and the near impossibility of happiness between a man and a woman. Especially in French cinema, the former is hardly a unique subject, but her work’s queasiness stems from her frequent coupling of both themes. Fat Girl takes this daring one step further, incorporating a twist into its final reel that makes viewers reconsider everything that came before it.

The opening shot of Fat Girl—chunky 12-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) staring glumly into the camera against a dark background—refers to the ending, although one can’t foresee this in advance. All we know at first is that Anaïs, her 15-year-old sister Elena (Roxane Mesquida) and their parents (Arsinée Khanjian and Romain Goupil) are taking a summer vacation from their home in the Parisian suburbs. Shortly after Anaïs announces that she’d like to lose her virginity but that “the first time should be with nobody,” Elena meets an Italian law student, Fernando (Libero De Rienzo), at a cafe. Even though Anaïs is tagging along, they began making out before the bill arrives.

That night, Fernando sneaks into Elena and Anaïs’ room and begins the lengthy process of convincing Elena to let him deflower her. In an excruciatingly tense, claustrophobic scene that lasts almost 20 minutes, he eventually gets her to have anal sex with him, which Anaïs watches and hears from her bed in the other corner. After Fernando spends the night with Elena, the tenderness he showed her turns out to be a facade. When she wants to give him head, he rejects her, citing the age-of-consent laws, which didn’t prevent him from creeping into her bedroom the night before. Pretending that he wants to marry her, he gives her an “engagement ring,” which turns out to be stolen from his mother. Genuine, if ambivalent, desire makes it difficult for Elena to navigate her way through Fernando’s manipulations.

The relationship between Anaïs and Elena is a difficult one, neither completely friendly nor antagonistic. The film gets a pretty realistic handle on the mixture of affection and rivalry that often makes it hard for siblings to get along, especially in a scene where Anaïs and Elena talk to each other laughingly on Elena’s bed. (Although the bluntness of the film’s English title suits the material, the original French title, which translates as “to my sister,” would have shed a different light on their bond.) In many respects, Elena seems to be her sister’s alter ego: thin, sociable, pretty and popular with boys. However, Anaïs has a privileged vantage point from which to observe Elena. She sees enough to learn that Elena’s life may not be so enviable and that sexual attractiveness may be a double-edged sword. Compared with other Breillat films, Fat Girl benefits from paying attention to the emotional life between women.

Breillat’s two previous films, Parfait Amour! and Romance, suggested that rape and other forms of violence are inseparable from sex. (Those titles are ironic, just in case you were wondering.) Recognizing that all sex scenes are implicitly or explicitly voyeuristic, these movies challenged viewers by presenting male-female couplings in harshly un-erotic terms. Fat Girl extends that challenge placing the voyeur onscreen and making her a 12-year-old girl. Has any other film ever shown a girl losing her virginity while another girl watches? Anaïs is too individual and distinctive a character to serve as a mere surrogate for the spectator, yet during this sex scene, we’re made to share her perspective. At the same time, we’re prevented from viewing Elena as a simple victim of male piggishness, since she complies in making Anaïs witness her liaison. This scene’s titillation value is further displaced by the nervous tension created by Breillat’s camera setup, which either focuses relentlessly on Elena and Fernando or paces anxiously around them.

Fat Girl is essentially structured in three parts: The first is set in the family summer home and centers around Elena and Fernando’s sex scene. The second kicks off when the sisters and their mother return to Paris. Here, Breillat makes a real stretch, re-expressing her film’s themes through purely visual means. With all three women feeling rather dejected, the mother makes her way through highways filled with omnipresent trucks. Their car constantly has to maneuver around them, getting stuck for a while behind a particularly huge, menacing red one. An air of vague but unmistakable dread permeates these scenes, stemming mostly from Breillat’s use of screen space, although on a second viewing, her foreshadowing becomes blatant. Without forcing the analogy, the trucks make a wonderful metaphor for male power.

I can’t go any further in describing Fat Girl without giving away the ending, which I’ll refrain from doing. On first viewing, it seemed like cheap shock value, as if Italian horror director Dario Argento had suddenly—and jarringly—taken the reins from Breillat. The second time around, it looked like an essential part of the film. All along, Breillat expresses the same point of view about the inevitability of power struggles between men and women, but her ending—in particular, the final line—leaves the film open to multiple readings.

Breillat told interviewer B. Ruby Rich in Filmmaker magazine, “Society wants to know if a young girl is a virgin or not. I think that is a rape.... We give so much emphasis to the sexual acts of a young girl that [Elena] wants [Fernando] to tell her lies. When she agrees to have sex with him, she agrees because she thinks it’s love. But she’s really accepting this rationale because of his lies. I think this is mental rape, the worst rape.”

In its fatalistic view of male-female relationships, Fat Girl goes even further than Parfait Amour! and Romance, implying that outright violence may be preferable to hypocritical sexual and emotional manipulation. But even if Breillat’s ideas are anything but redemptive, neither are they reductive. While Fernando may be an asshole, the film doesn’t entirely demonize him, and Elena is complicit in her own actions: She passes up plenty of opportunities to definitively say no to him. Far from being a mere provocateur (although she certainly is one), Breillat shines a light on the way everyday sexism degrades all concerned.