Directed by Catherine Breillat
Written by Catherine Breillat
Starring Anaïs Reboux, Roxane Mesquida, Libero De Rienzo, Arsinée Khanjian
France/Italy/Spain, 2001
[spoilers]
Breillat has presented the world in terms of our constructed gender roles and the cultural sacredness of a woman’s virginity; in Fat Girl, she rips the twinkle and gloss off our illusions of sex, family, and the innocence of childhood and disregards the sanctity of nudity. The sisters are soiled by their own raging hormones and have imagined everything, are desensitized, their eyes glazed over. Anaïs is the chosen one from whose point-of-view we see the world; she is the on-screen voyeur who acts as a substitute for the audience and behaves like a middle-aged ex-romantic gypped by love – a miniature, female Sinatra singing suicide songs. Though a virgin, she imagines that she will never find romance, and believes that “the first time should be with nobody.”
Usually in the movies we see teenagers surviving the era of self-loathing, getting through their “first time” unscathed. I know in America, in the push-and-pull values of MTV, there’s a friction between our acknowledgement of the dangers in sex and our imagined sexual utopias where all the kids get it on and all of them survive. But, here, Anaïs and Elena seem mortally wounded by Sexuality; there is no hope in Breillat’s voice because she sings, operatically, whimsically, and from her feminist but individual perspective, about nothing less than the downfall of men and women in society. Her topic is broad and sweeping and ambitious to the point of pretension, but her movie is so frightening because she doesn’t let us off the hook; she stabs us with humor and the shock value of her images, most of them meditative, not disguised by quick and jumpy edits: there are long sequences starring erect penises and pubic hair; naked Anaïs peeing in the dunes; and an ending with an unexpected assault.
The finality of a girl’s loss of virginity is apocalyptic in Breillat’s vision, and her booming presence proclaims that hell on earth is not a figment of the imagination but has already been created. She reflects both the new connotations of sex – how the word seems to spell death – and the sexual politics designed by our ancestors. The writer-director puts characters and audience in emotional limbo, drawing a disturbing connection between pornography and cinema – mediums based on the manipulation of the audience’s senses and feelings and the exploitation of the human libido. In recent American movies, in the sarcastic, specifically female antiheroes of Christina Ricci and her ilk, the cynicism we may gain during adolescence or young adulthood is given the Midas touch of comedy; the heroines aren’t victims because their sardonic tone is seen as the control of nonconformist onlookers sick of bullshit. But the black humor in Fat Girl’s two sisters is also the gigantic human tragedy of being a cipher, much as the sexually precocious Nabokov character Lolita was – completely dependent on others when everybody in the world is a sleaze. While Breillat’s girls are never really sympathetic, the film does acknowledge, neither conveniently nor patronizingly, the fragility of young minds during the ages defined by transition. The combination of naïveté and adult desires is violent fusion.
As in a chilling psychological horror flick, the atmosphere grabs us from the start. It’s muggy, thick as a swamp, charged with the terror of loneliness. Anaïs sees no future for herself, and Fat Girl has no background surrounding it; we never see the innocence that was lost, or the possibility of innocence. There’s no opportunity for warm feelings or misplaced sympathy. What’s wrong with the movie is that the evils of the world are too often placed on the shoulders of everyone’s favorite villains, Parents and Men, maybe because the tight running time doesn’t allow for richer characterizations. The father (Romain Goupil) is unconcerned and treats his family as an obligation (I don’t remember seeing his face in the movie). The mother (Arsinée Khanjian) is a human chimney, shriveled by hate and cigarettes, a ghost in her nightgown. The broader evil is the middle class, obviously, who all carry the disease of callousness.
Throughout history, men have been the barbarians and women the angels, probably because the world has always been of violence and chaos and “female” meant “The Other.” Breillat continues the separation. She reaches her pinnacle in male-bashing during the finale, when we are left with the thought that Anaïs has been abandoned in the cruel, brutal world of men. The boldest statement is the comparison of statutory rape and rape by coercion to the physical sexual violence; Breillat sees no difference. But a disturbing idea, whether intentionally implied or not, is that women can turn that abuse around and work it to their advantage and pleasure. Elena uses her boyfriend’s pushiness because she wants affection too; she ends up being surprised at how much exploitation hurts. Anaïs can twist the rape into wish fulfillment – now she has lost her virginity to someone she does not care for, now she has been “broken in.”
The male perspective is, conveniently, never touched, and the women are seen as slightly more human and more compassionate because they share feelings and thoughts (and Anaïs actually uses the word “morals” at one point); though the ending is stunningly ambiguous, the great tragedy may be that Anaïs is turned into one of Breillat’s men – cold, numb, heartless. Ultimately, however, the director’s broader evil is (gasp!) humanity itself, or God Himself – who is very absent in the film. But even though Breillat hates us all, her movie is, at the very least, delivered in frank, honest cynicism with feverish conviction, and at the most, humorously grotesque manipulation of senses, feelings, and libido.
By Andrew Chan [JUNE 28, 2002]