Fat Girl (The Criterion Collection)
by Catherine Breillat
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Anaïs Reboux, Arsinée Khanjian, Libero De Rienzo, Romain Goupil, Roxane MesquidaDirector: Catherine Breillat
Brand: BREILLAT,CATHERINE
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 86 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-10-19
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of Fat Girl (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: Not your average rites-of-passage teen movie.
Summary: 5 Stars
When I first heard that the English title of Catherine Breillat's 'A ma soeur' (literally 'for my sister') was 'Fat Girl', I was shocked that such sexism and sizism could exist in such strangulatingly p.c. times, especially in the light of the director's uncompromising, though idiosyncratic feminism. But from the very first sequence, Anais' weight is foregrounded, as she devours a banana split at a cafe while her sister is being chatted up by an Italian student. The body is the focus of this film, its display, and the attempts to control it, whether by deciding how much you're going to eat, by seducing minors or by deciding to whom you'll offer your virginity. Like another recent French film, Patrice Chereau's 'Intimacy', Breillat focuses on sexuality in a way hostile to mainstream cinema. Unlike 'Intimacy', whose gauche attempts at realism destroyed its credibility, Breillat insists on formality and artifice, from the summer holiday setting, with its two heroines 'locked up' in a chalet that, with its guards, gates, bars, curfews seems like a high security prison; to the ritualistic manner in which characters negotiate sex; to Breillat's awesomely complicated filming apparatus. The film's coup-de-theatre is a lengthy scene in which Elena sneaks in her boyfriend to the bedroom she shares with a sister she assumes is asleep. Not only is the viewer faced with the problematics of staring at the naked, fetishised body of a minor, and the increasingly grotesque and hypocritical attempts of her lover to seduce her; not only is the framing unflinchingly static, with the odd, sinisterly creeping movement, and the tight compositions forcing the two lovers into an airless claustrophobia; but our voyeurism is shared by our knowledge of the mostly unseen gaze of the younger girl looking on. Though this is the longest and most rigorous example, the film is full of scenes like this, triangular groupings of characters inflicting or evading each others' surveillance, while the parents who have theoretically imposed a rigid discipline on the girls see nothing. Spatial relations draw attention to themselves, as do the symbolic resonances of the settings (chopped woods, dunes etc.). The filming is deliberately unshowy, often flat. Narrative proceeds by a looping pattern, the same characters shifting positions in similarly-set scenes. So rarefied and artificial is this milieu, that when reminders of the outside world intrude, such as financial worries, it is shocking. And this is where the film becomes especially brilliant. What seemed to have been a fascinating dramatisation of ideas culled from feminism and film theory, focusing on ideas of free will, choice, exploitation, truth, knowledge, appetite etc., the extraordinary last third reminds us that we don't always have a final say in everything we do. The mix of suspense and surprise, and the play on doubles, mirrors, sleeping and fairy tale motifs, is masterly.
Summary of Fat Girl (The Criterion Collection)
Twelve-year old Anaïs is fat. Her older sister, Eléna, is a teenage beauty. While on vacation with her parents, Anaïs tags along behind Eléna, exploring the dreary seaside town. Eléna meets Fernando, an Italian law student, who seduces her with promises of love, as the ever-watchful Anaïs bears witness to the corruption of her sister?s innocence. Precise and uncompromising, Fat Girl (À Ma soeur!) is a bold dissection of sibling rivalry and female adolescent sexuality from one of contemporary cinema?s most controversial directors.Fat Girl is a typically shocking, utterly discomfiting provocation from director Catherine Breillat, whose excursions into female psychology and movie sexuality are anything but clinical. (See 36 Fillette and Romance for further proof.) Two adolescent sisters journey to the seaside on vacation with their parents; the younger sister is overweight and brooding, the older girl a beauty who attracts the attention of a smooth-talking boy. Much of the film is built around two painstaking seduction scenes, characteristically shot by Breillat with both comic and horrific overtones and long, uncomfortable takes. The final section then tips into an outright descent into hell--you can never let your guard down with Breillat. So complicated were the seduction scenes that Breillat subsequently made a feature about the shooting of them, Sex Is Comedy. Fat Girl was released under an alternate title, A ma soeur!, but Fat Girl, in English, is Breillat's original and preferred title. --Robert Horton
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