Photo: Anaïs Reboux as Anaïs and Roxane Mesquida as Elena in Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl
Fat Girl supplies a startling vision of the prickly crawlspace between innocence and sexual awakening. Catherine Breillat's notions of perseverance are at once sensible and unnerving, so that love becomes indistinguishable from rape. Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) is the fat girl of the film's title, a poised creature who repeatedly engages and teases the spectator's morality. Key here is how Breillat expertly forces the audience to look at the world through the girl's point of view, intelligently and with a sly mix of humor, as when Anaïs tells her sister, the gorgeous Elena (Roxane Mesquida) that she reeks of loose morals. Young but stoic, Anaïs vigilantly clings to her virginity the more her sister threatens to lose hers. She knows that she will spare herself a lot of pain if she looses it to someone she doesn't love, which makes a last-act penetration as shocking as it is perfectly rational.
Fat Girl supplies a startling vision of the prickly crawlspace between innocence and sexual awakening. Catherine Breillat's notions of perseverance are at once sensible and unnerving, so that love becomes indistinguishable from rape. Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) is the fat girl of the film's title, a poised creature who repeatedly engages and teases the spectator's morality. Key here is how Breillat expertly forces the audience to look at the world through the girl's point of view, intelligently and with a sly mix of humor, as when Anaïs tells her sister, the gorgeous Elena (Roxane Mesquida) that she reeks of loose morals. Young but stoic, Anaïs vigilantly clings to her virginity the more her sister threatens to lose hers. She knows that she will spare herself a lot of pain if she looses it to someone she doesn't love, which makes a last-act penetration as shocking as it is perfectly rational.
