À ma soeur!
***/****
starring Anais Reboux, Roxane Mesquida, Libero de Rienzo
written and directed by Catherine Breillat
by Walter Chaw
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
"Leda and the Swan" (1928)–William Butler Yeats
Yeats caused a minor stir in 1928 by suggesting that the rape of Leda was an empowerment for a sexually wise woman whose ultimate revenge against manhood was the spawning of Helen of Troy–who, of course, had a key role in the fall of an entire nation. The idea of ill-gotten knowledge as it's tied to a woman's evolving sexuality is not a new one–Biblical and older, in fact. Still, Catherine Breillat throws a new acerbic barb into the psychosexual brew by projecting Freud's classic developmental framework (anal, oral, genital) onto the progression of the uncomfortable seduction of the impossibly young Elena (Roxane Mesquida) by a smooth-talking Italian lothario (Libero de Rienzo). It is only one, though perhaps the most subtle, of Breillat's incendiary yawps against man's barbarism to woman. As Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), the titular fat girl, summarizes at one point: "All men are sick."
Breillat is mad as hell. There can be no mistaking her militant feminism as it manifests in an artless eye and brutal tableaux–instincts that distinctly recall Larry Clark's callous nihilism. Anaïs, the mordant younger sister of Mesquida's 15-year-old sexpot, is a catastrophe of budding resentments and fractured idealism. Her "unattractiveness" has made her wise about the importance of being sexually alluring, and the girls' embittered mother (Arsinée Khanjian) plays them against each other in the feckless way that parents sometimes do. Elena is a slut and Anaïs fat and ugly; should any of the three actresses misstep, Fat Girl instantly becomes something maudlin and burlesque. Not a one of them do. With a final ten minutes that recall Yeats's "a sudden blow," Fat Girl is clinically grim, explicit, and effective. It's not a fun night out at the movies, but it has the weight of the broken wall, the burning roof and tower of personal violation and the rites of womanhood.
