Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 20, 2014 4:42 am 
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MARINE VARCTH IN YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL

Belle de jour ado

Ozon's Young and Beautiful (Jeune et jolie) is a shocker, but it's also simple and elegant, its elegant simplicity making way for ambiguities. Through this channel it's thought-provoking; but the beauty of this story, though it has rarely been told, is that it also contains little that is truly unexpected. Mike D'Angelo put it differently, tweeting from Cannes: "Character study of teen hooker initially seems banal, but banality proves to be its secret weapon." Jeune et jolie is a banal object that's also a glittering bauble sparkling from every angle.

A middle-class girl who lives at home and attends a famous Paris school, Lyçée Henri IV, has her 17th birthday, and then quietly sets about to become a pute, a prostitute. We might call her a "high priced call girl." With online media, it's a cinch for a well-informed ado (teenager) to set herself up for such "work," without the need of gangsters or pimps. In fact it's easier for a well-bred, well-off girl like Isabelle (long-limbed, gazelle-like ex-model Marine Vacth) to do it. Isabelle schedules up her meetings online or on a new cell phone she's bought for this purpose. She goes to expensive hotels and meets older, in several cases much older, men for sex.

And then something happens involving favorite client Georges (Johan Leysen) and her family finds out and, after several seasons have passed, she stops. Events lead to her talking to a woman police officer and to a a male psychiatrist arranged by her mother (Géraldine Pailhas ). Naturally, the shrink (Serge Hefez) looks like one of her johns. So does her stepfather (Frédéric Pierrot ). Ozon doesn't take us inside the cold, elegant Isabelle's head. She is "precocious." But is she "warped," "perverse," "dirty" (her mother uses words like this) or just an adolescent discovering her sexuality and going through (in a word her stepfather uses) "a phase"?

A 17-year-old girl as striking and self-possessed as Isabelle can appear to be 20, or 18 anyway. Or, an older man who pays her €300 to come to his hotel room can pretend he thinks she is 20, because he wants to. The younger she is the fresher and more perfect she looks.

When the game is over Isabelle kisses a classmate at a party and he begins dating her, and spends the night at her house. It's on the way to being a normal sophisticated 21st century relationship of two young people. But Isabelle soon ends it. And because of what has happened it's not at all clear if she will have a "normal" sex life in years to come. Will Isabelle not become bored with an ordinary marriage and seek entertainment and profit in the afternoon, like Catherine Deneuve in Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour? The precocious Isabelle (who takes the name Lea for her "work") is like an ado Belle de Jour. She's the ultimate jaded teenager, jaded far beyond her time -- before she has in truth learned much about life, she thinks she knows it all. And of course when she has sex with her classmate, Ozon can't resist showing that she can use sophisticated techniques to enhance his pleasure and enable his performance. Young and Beautiful is cool glittering prono, and a teenage manual for precocious sex.

Like Chabrol before him (and like Buñuel), François Ozon is a storyteller who tweaks the wilder edges of the bourgeoisie. It's normal to be precocious for young, sophisticated adolescents. Ozon touches on the tradition when he shows students at the Lyçée Henri IV discussing the poem by Arthur Rimbaud, a precocious poet at exactly that age, where he says no one is serous at 17. How naive are these young people? Christophe Honoré's La Belle personne (adapted from La Princesse de Clèves) adapts Paris teenagers into a complicated plot involving 17th-century courtiers.

As Leslie Felperin points out in Variety, Isabelle is first seen through binoculars wielded by her younger brother, Victor (Fantin Ravat), "as she discreetly loosens her bikini bra to sunbathe topless. She’s indeed a character more often seen through others’ eyes, giving little of herself away." Victor, a slightly feminine little boy who wants to hear all about it, is like an understated eyepiece or alter ego for Ozon himself throughout. When Isabelle first 'sheds' her virginity with her "dumb" (con) "himbo" German boyfriend Felix, not even worth introducing to her family, Felperin notes, she is watching herself.

Young and Beautiful doesn't have the self-reflective meta- qualities of Ozon's other recent return to form, In the House, but is also, like it, a brilliant study of a risk-taking teenager, one this time whose gloss and sensuality may appeal even more to arthouse audiences. With a late, important cameo appearance by Charlotte Rampling.

Young and Beautiful/Jeune et jolie, 94 mins., debuted at Cannes 2013 and showed at many international festivals. It opened in France 21 Aug. 2013 with generally favorable reviews (Allociné: 3.7, 74%). UK release was 29 Nov. Set to be released by Sundance in the US. It was nominated for two 2014 César Awards: Géraldine Pailhas (Best Supporting Actress) and Marine Vacth (Most Promising Actress). Screened for this review as part of the UniFrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (6-16 Mar. 2014).
Friday, 7 Mar., 8:00pm – IFC; Saturday, 8 Mar., 6:30pm – WRT; Saturday, 8 Mar., 9:00pm - BAM
In Person: François Ozon.


The US theatrical release of Young and Beautiful begins in New ork 25 April 2014.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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