Starring: Marine Vacth, Johan Leysen, Geraldine Pailhas, Fantin Ravat, Frederic Pierrot, and Charlotte Rampling
Distributor: Hopscotch Films
Runtime: 94 mins. Reviewed in May 2014
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This French, subtitled drama tells the story of the sexual explorations of a 17-year old girl, Isabelle (Marine Vacth) who becomes a prostitute, working under the name of Lea. The film takes place over the course of a year in southern France, and is divided into four seasonal segments, that are introduced by four French songs.
Dispassionately and tearfully losing her virginity on the beach one night, Isabelle decides, unbeknownst to her mother, Sylvie (Geraldine Pailhas) and stepfather, Patrick (Frederic Pierrot) to explore the limits of her sexuality as a prostitute. As Isabelle, she studies by day as a student at school. As Lea, she meets clients regularly in hotel rooms in the late afternoon and night to have sex with them. She has no apparent interest in the sexual encounters themselves, and her clients are typically middle-aged or older men.
Among her clients is an older man, Georges (Johan Leysen), with whom she forms a meaningful friendship. In time, a tenderness develops between them that catches Isabelle by surprise. He is sweeter than most. In a night of sex with him, Georges dies from a heart attack, and Lea quits her sex industry work in shock. The Police investigate what happened, and tell her mother, who is distraught to learn of her daughter’s secret life.
In many respects this movie is a soft-core version of the role Catherine Deneuve took as a privileged adult freelancing as a prostitute by night in Bunuel’s classic 1967 masterpiece, “Belle de Jour”. The movie is an emotionally fraught study of a precocious teenager who knows a lot about how to seduce men, but doesn’t know what she is doing, or where she is heading in her sexual journey. It is an erotic tale about sexual awakening. Lea’s encounters with men, except with Georges, are for the most part directed by Francois Ozon as seedy ones, and she travels through her encounters completely unfeelingly.
Ozon gives little attention to explaining Isabelle’s behaviour. His exploration of teenage sexuality is prurient, rather than character-revealing. Isabelle seems to care only for her younger brother, Victor (Fantin Ravat), who voyeuristically watches her undress on the beach through binoculars in the film’s opening sequence, and for Georges. Ozon does, however, raise meaningful questions about burgeoning desire, but leaves his questions to be considered rather than answered. He explores Isabelle’s character and intentionally provides no reason why. The focus of the film is firmly on restless adolescence, and the breaking-out of sexuality. The movie highlights in a negative way the erotic power of female sexuality, and male response to it.
Where the movie comes into its own are the scenes where the family comes apart as the truth of Isabelle’s behaviour shatters their apparent comfort and stability. The family thought they knew one another, but clearly they do not. They are a wealthy, middle-class family who have no understanding of why Isabelle needed to behave in the way she did. Was it the mundaneness of her life with them, their failure to understand her sexual needs, Isabelle’s desire to become an adult before the time was right, or the rebellious nature of teenage precociousness that was left unchecked?
This is a confidently directed movie about teenage prostitution, that ultimately aims for voyeurism and achieves it. Though well executed and accomplished in the technical aspects of its direction, it is an immoral tale, where the morality of the behaviour is never an issue. A surprise turn – in every sense of the word – by Georges’ wife (Charlotte Rampling) at the end of the movie gives the film an ambiguous conclusion that almost takes one’s breath away in stretching unacceptably the moral boundaries of what has gone before.
The restricted classification given to this film appropriately warns the unwary to keep well away.
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