Fat Girl (2001)

I love this movie so much

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux in her only acting role as of 2013) is the titular character in Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl ("À ma soeur!" being its original French title). A chubby twelve year old girl, who finds herself constantly browbeaten by her fifteen year old sister, Elena (Roxane Mesquida) while they are vacationing with their parents off the coast of France. Elena, unlike her sister, is thin, incredibly gorgeous, and possesses a beautiful body. A topic of discussion between the two young girls as they listlessly walk around the resort is their virginity and their relationships. Elena, while sexually promiscuous, holds the belief that your virginity should be taken by someone you love. Her younger sister, however, believes that you should your first time should happen just to happen and you should just get it over with.While walking, they meet a law student named Fernando (Libero De Rienzo), who immediately finds himself attracted to Elena. Not long after meeting him does Elena invite Fernando up to her room to talk. Fernando believes like Elena does - that sex should be something sacred and special - but he winds up convincing her to partake in anal sex instead, as vaginal sex is something that judges whether or not you still have your virginity.While it is questionable that Fernando actually believes what he is saying, we can see Elena's hesitation during the foreplay and the sex. We are well aware of her beliefs at this point in time, however, we can see that she has a common curiosity about sex so much so that she simply wants to see just how the act is performed and executed.This scene is one lengthy, naturalistic shot Breillat conducts in the room shared by Elena and Anaïs, boldly establishing real-time, mood, and discomfort just by the way the shot is framed, how long it lasts, and how the characters are placed inside the shot. Fernando and Elena are spooning, with Elena's nightgown on and her vagina and pubic hair clearly visible to the audience. Fernando continues to rub her stomach in a way that doesn't change Elena's blank, frustrated, and confused expression. She knows what she's doing is wrong but is overcome by understandable adolescent curiosity. Anaïs is laying in bed several feet away, closing her eyes and pretending her sister's innocence isn't being taken away in front of her.Fat Girl works well because it illustrates the sexual tendencies of the female and a believable sibling rivalry that is captured with surprising purity and tenderness. When Anaïs and Elena fight, it's nothing but believable. When the two talk quietly in bed it is also believable, almost as if they are real-life sisters. This is because Reboux and Mesquida are not only great screen presences but evoke relatable chemistry as young girls. This chemistry is what the entire film rests on, due to the fact that parents' roles are predicated off of disinterest and ignorance, leaving the girls to utilize each other for companionship and advice.It's a tough subject and Breillat doesn't sugarcoat it. Either she lived a grim reality similar to her characters or she has seen friends go through circumstances akin to Anaïs's and Elena's. Or perhaps she has her head inside a teenage girls' head. Perhaps she just has a deep resonance and an awareness to the sexual maturity of adolescent girls. If that's the case, it would be tough to communicate such a resonance, but Breillat finds ways to do so in Fat Girl that make the film an unsettling and often very consuming piece of work.Much has been made about the ending that is admittedly out of nowhere, able to shock the most hardened viewer raw because of its jolting nature, and implied to add ambiguity and an additional layer to the story. After several hours, where it has crossed my mind about every five minutes, I have not made up my mind on it. An amendment to the review will be made if I do. Perhaps it's a rare moment when an instance in a very great film happens that I'll never be able to define. Did I like it? Did I loathe it? Is it out of place? Does it derail the story? No matter the answer to the question, the previous seventy-nine minutes were still disturbing and well worth seeing.Starring: Anaïs Reboux, Roxane Mesquida, Libero De Rienzo, and Arsinée Khanjian. Directed by: Catherine Breillat.

I had to watch this film for my university French course and, don't get me wrong, I love French and French cinema, but this is one of the exceptions. For the majority of the film, I was bored, confused and occasionally repulsed. My repulsion is quite explainable, due to the amount of nuditiy in this film. While I don't find the female body repulsive, I do find needless scenes of female nudity being shoved in my face repulsive, particularly when they involve the breasts of a 14 year- old girl. My boredom and confusion however, stem from the fact that virtually every scene in this film is either too long or goes nowhere, often just seeming like filler. There are also scenes which make no sense whatsoever, such as when Anaïs suddenly appears naked on the beach, without any rhyme or reason. Then, suddenly, at the end, we are hit by an unfeasibly dark 'twist'. I put 'twist' in inverted commas because the mood of the film towards the end makes it blatantly obvious that there will be one. The only thing we aren't told is what that twist is. The twist itself is needlessly violent, and the reactions of the characters are somewhat confusing.This film shall be condemned to the vast scrapheap of movies I have seen, simply because it goes nowhere and makes little to no sense.

Fat Girl (2001) **** (out of 4) 12-year-old Anais (Anais Reboux) and her 15-year-old sister Elena (Roxane Mesquida) are on summer vacation when the two discover sex and start to explore their virginity. Things take a change for reality when the older sister meets a boy who claims to love her. This is an incredible little film and there's no wonderful it caused so much controversy here in the States. I think it's a damn shame that American films no longer contain any guts and when a film with a true message comes along it usually stirs up trouble. This is an incredibly moving, heartbreaking and shocking look at two young girls and how they view their virginity. The ending was outrageously shocking but the message was right there. It's been a very long time since I've seen a film that left such an impact. I'm sure most will be turned off by the subject matter and the films blunt truthfulness towards that subject but this is a real gem.

a true portrait of some incredibly immature people you can't possibly come to care one bit about, who flop from one impulse or random surface emotion to another, lie to and absent-mindedly manipulate each other, with loads of prurient underage sex that adds nothing to the story, and a supremely lazy ending that i wish like hell i could get out of my memory. if you want to believe the above reviewers who say it's all poignant and intimate and all that, well go right ahead and see it. but when you hate the vicious ending and can't get it out of your head ever and it gives you the creeps every time you think of it, well, i did try to warn you. i've seen a couple of her films (this will be the last ever), and she seems to take a very schizophrenic delight in openly wallowing in the permissive/sordid lives of her characters, only to kill them out of nowhere, ultimately an incredibly dull moralizing prudishness masked as curiosity. maybe this smelled like a big windup to some big revelation to her, but to me it just stunk.