By Tom Sime, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – French director Catherine Breillat may be 53 now, but the spirit of the precocious child is still her trademark. The former prodigy, who published her first novel at 17 and made her first film at 28, has since transferred her own audaciously frank view of youthful sexuality to her characters. Her latest picture, the startling drama "Fat Girl," is a story of summer vacation sexual awakening that takes a radically different approach to the genre.
Though "Fat Girl" exposes the likes of "American Pie" as sheer fantasy, it has an eerie unreality of its own, a dream-nightmare quality. This despite its especially gritty view of what me might euphemistically call first love. Ana?s Reboux plays Ana?s, a 12-year-old girl who eats compulsively. She's sullen and overweight, unlike her older sister Elena, who?s slender and gorgeous at 15 - if equally sullen.
The two share a bipolar blend of rivalry and collaboration. One minute, they're fighting viciously, giving vent to their cruelest thoughts. Then they're reconciling with an intimacy that shows the sweeter natures of both. Elena, played by Roxane Mesquida, must take Ana?s along with her to appease their mother, and she resents it. But she doesn't let it stop her from pursuing boys, who pursue Elena just as avidly with Ana?s as captive witness drinking it all in through jaded young eyes.
For their summer holiday, the girls and their parents take a trip to the seaside, where Elena decides to lose her virginity to a young Italian named Fernando, played by Libero de Rienzo. Fernando influences Elena's decision mostly with persuasion, but he also gives her a beautiful opal ring to prove his devotion.
All this gets by their mother, played by Arsinee Khanjian. But then Fernando's mother comes to try to get back the ring, which is actually hers. And in Elena's absence, mother turns on Ana?s in a fury, enraged by the younger girl's refusal to incriminate her sister.
The story of Ana?s and Elena is simple, even mundane, and that's where Breillat's artistry comes in. The writer-director bathes the movie in transparent, deceptively soothing colors, and manages to make the girls' summer doldrums ring with portent and suspense. The sense of impending disaster escalates with gripping subtlety, climaxing in the mother's angry insistence that she and the girls drive home at once to meet their father, who has threatened to have Elena examined by a doctor and Fernando charged with raping a minor.
The car trip home is fraught with foreboding, and Breillat does an amazing job of staging the simple journey as a nightmarish duel between the girls' mother and the huge trucks that surround and crowd her car. It's an inspired parallel for the sense of menace that so often dogs women venturing through the world on their own. Where the girls and their mother end up shouldn't be revealed, but chances are no one will be ready for Fat Girl's shocking, enigmatic conclusion.
Tom Sime is a staff critic for The Dallas Morning News.