Fat Girl (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

brilliant portrayal of adolescent female sexuality
It upsets me that reviewers have focused on the issues of weight and female competition and jealousy that do exist in this film, but completely ignore the major point of this film. Breillat gives us a brutally honest portrayal of female "baptism" into sexuality. It is not pretty, or romantic, or even sensual (as the socially astute "fat girl" realizes). The older sister, whose bed is surrounded by issues of Cosmo, appropriately enough) is hyper-feminized, and believes that she needs to look as if she stepped off the pages of Cosmo to get and keep and please a man--the most important tasks a woman is given by our culture. Her younger sister is less accepting of these--in fact she repeatedly says that she wants to lose her virginity to someone she doesn't love (a fact consistenly ignored by reviewers in their reviews, and vital to understanding the ending and the distinction between the two sisters). The shocking ending is so significant in this regard--Breillat...

Not your average rites-of-passage teen movie.
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...

another disturbing/engaging look at sexuality from Breillat
Ana