Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I can’t believe how well written this review is, since it’s signed by a guy named Joe Slutt. Go figure.
This is Joe Slutt. Again, I don't know if this is cool news, but I figured you might enjoy a smoke signal from the New York Film Festival. Enjoy!
"FAT GIRL" (aka "A MA SOEUR!")
DIR: CATHERINE BREILLAT
It was difficult to know exactly how to react to the sight of Catherine Breillat -- dimunitive, exuberant and soft-spoken often to the point of unintelligibility -- as she solemnly used her best broken English to introduce her latest film, "Fat Girl" (aka "A Ma Soeur!") to the New York Film Festival. She mentioned how the humor levelled at the expense of an obese and pubescent French girl on a soul-crushing summer vacation with her family might be interpreted by some as fodder for a prime-time sitcom.
"Do not believe the sitcom," Breillat intoned in all seriousness, perhaps in an attempt to foreshadow the unforgettably gruesome act of violence that closes the film and sent audience members leaping out of their seats. "Comedy leads to tragedy."
Anais (Anais Reboux) is a twelve year-old fat girl who lives in the shadow of her manipulative and self-conscious sexpot of an older sister, Elena (Roxane Mesquida). While Anais' emerging sexual desire begins to manifest itself in ways that could only be described as "Breillat-esque" -- including her imagined love affair with a stainless-steel railing in a swimming pool -- Elena quickly lures a much-older Italian law student named Fernando (Libero de Rienzo) into her world of perversion.
Anais and Elena happen to share a room at their vacation home. Anais often feigns sleep for hours on end while spying on her sister's sexual escapades, which more often than not involve Fernando's protestations that Elena can still consider herself a virgin even if she offers up her anus for him to penetrate.
Their parents are a boorish lot, and their mother (Arsinee Khanjian, an Armenian-born actress known to most world-cinema wags as "Mrs. Atom Egoyan") is a near-narcoleptic mess who can barely complete a simple drive through the country without extended stops at rest areas, where she makes derogatory comments about fellow travellers. "People are pigs," she snarls while watching a nearby couple munch on vending-machine snacks.
The most unsettling (and most interesting) element of the plot involves how Anais has become an all-but-manufactured scapegoat for this despicable family's petty woes. Her mother and her sister slap Anais around and belittle her pear-shaped figure until she bursts into tears. They assuage her sorrow by force-feeding her buttered baguettes and what one can only guess is taffy. This oft-repeated ritual seems only to inflate Anais' waist-line, which increases her mother and sister's contempt for her, which eventually leads to ... well, more of the same.
What is additionally unique about "Fat Girl" is that Breillat treads the same stale water of her earlier efforts but has seemingly found the proper context to fulfill the sweep of her strokes. For example:
Elena is not the annoying adolescent anti-hero of "36 Fillette," who discovers her new-found ability to attract dirty old men and uses it to megalomaniacal effect; Elena finds a worldly and equally manipulative young man in Fernando, one who anticipates her every conversational trap and ensnares her within them.
Anais is not the perenially libidinous titular figure of "Une Vraie Jeune Fille," who spends her summer vacation attempting to seduce a hunky lumberjack; Anais is a creature of disappointment and jealousy, one who can only bring herself to eat banana splits and lie in angry silence while yearning to be violated in the same fashion as her lascivious sister.
Nor is her Italian boyfriend the self-styled satyr and Bukowski-skimming intellectual that Rocco Siffredi portrayed in "Romance"; Fernando is a confident clod who has devoted his vacation to seducing the underage object of obsession and makes no apologies for it until confronted by circumstance.
The oft-alluded-to conclusion of "Fat Girl" will likely strike most viewers as cathartic and expected, given the director's particular fetish for the distintegration of the bourgeois family unit and her self-proclaimed status as a puritanical filmmaker. But its very inclusion appears to be an afterthought, even if Breillat insists that a tabloid's portrayal of a comparable true story is what inspired her to write the screenplay in the first place.
The question-and-answer session at the Lincoln Center that followed the screening was quite a rousing affair. An audience member asked if Breillat felt it was improper to subject a real-life overweight adolescent to on-screen humiliation. "Why should I answer any questions about morality?" she countered through her interpreter. "We're at a film festival, after all."
Making light of the explicit and almost exploitative nature of the film, the director returned to her initial metaphor of the sitcom. Breillat offered that she sought to provide "the opposite of ellipses" in showing what popular entertainment often presents with neutered amusement. She even recounted how she came to distrust the off-screen bond that Reboux and Mesquida had developed in anathema to their characters' antagonistic relationship on-screen. "Their television culture made me furious," Breillat complained.
The director also insisted that "Fat Girl" was always the intended title of the film, even if it is an exceedingly loose translation of its French title, "A Ma Soeur!" She explained that the latter was a local colloquialism commonly used for toasts; as such, she found it to be a more fitting title for French audiences. "It was not the distributor who betrayed me," she assured.
Most tellingly, she recalled taking particular joy as a child in frightening her younger sister with the tale of "Bluebeard," elaborating in graphic detail how the title character took to hanging his wives by their hair. By doing so, Breillat was able to allay her own fears of being hung from her hair by a mad pirate. "I want to make people scream in my place," she giggled with almost sinister glee.
You can download the trailer of "Fat Girl" (aka "A Ma Soeur!") by clicking HERE!!
Thanks, Joe. “Do not trust the sitcom.” Hmmmm... didn’t Plato say that first?
"Moriarty" out.
