The auteur took a risk on this one and got screwed for it. But to invalidate it as art, especially in the light of compelling but questionable films such as "Baise Moi," is wrong.
This film is beautiful, well made, very artistic, has great thematic depth and makes a statement. What more are we looking for when we define something as art?
The first clue should be in the title: "A Real Young Girl.' Our culture (male dominant still,) is fascinated with sexualizing what are in our cultural context, inappropriately young females, that is, pubescent, underaged, or more gracefully put "blossoming." This is a complex issue not for discussion here, but the point is, artistic treatments of this subject have been predominantly male. So a "Real Young Girl" may be a statement indicating that the director is going to show you early adolescent female sexuality as it truly is, from someone who has experienced it first hand, and not as it is eroticized by male artists.
I think a big point of this film is that it is not pleasant and not easy, not fun or romantic, but painful, confusing, and filled with difficult feelings and disgust.
While the film is beautiful and leaves one with a not unpleasant feeling (it's a good film, the ending is abrupt and funny, but no more so than other great avant-garde or new-wave filmmakers.)
The eroticism can in no way be seen as pornography, though. Despite the explicitness of its photography (of the vagina especially,) there is no actual sex, and these explicit scenes are mixed with other aspects that open them to complex interpretation.
For instance, the main character undresses and experiments by putting red ink on her erogenous zones, but during the whole scene, a fly is very persistently buzzing around the room. I'm not going to go into detail interpreting, but you get my point.
Another very explicit scene, the character in her fantasy, bound with barbed-wire, spread eagled naked on the ground. We see very explicit close-up of her vagina, but this is concurrent with her fantasy lover dangling a live worm over it, and eventually pulling the worm apart and dropping the still squirming bits on her pubis.
Or a scene where walking on the beach to another fantasy, she drops her panties on the decaying corpse of a dog.
Again, interpret for yourself, but you'll see not only a depth of symbol, but a unity of theme in the natural world and decay as related to this young girl's perception of her vagina: something akin to stinky, swampy pit- far from the ripe, juicy peach of male imagination.
It gives what seems to my male mind, a convincing portrayal of early adolescent female sexuality from the perspective of a woman.
The director clearly loves the female form but the film is no more explicit, and certainly less shocking, than say Pasolini's "Salo." (In fact, if Pier had been attracted to women, I suspect he would have given us similarly graphic views instead of tending to orient on penises of extraordinary size.) It's hard to find this film exploitative in comparison to such celebrated films as "Last Tango in Paris."
I could go on and on but the point is, this is not a gray area somewhere near pornography, but a valid, necessary, and probably important (though only history will tell,) work.
This film is beautiful, well made, very artistic, has great thematic depth and makes a statement. What more are we looking for when we define something as art?
The first clue should be in the title: "A Real Young Girl.' Our culture (male dominant still,) is fascinated with sexualizing what are in our cultural context, inappropriately young females, that is, pubescent, underaged, or more gracefully put "blossoming." This is a complex issue not for discussion here, but the point is, artistic treatments of this subject have been predominantly male. So a "Real Young Girl" may be a statement indicating that the director is going to show you early adolescent female sexuality as it truly is, from someone who has experienced it first hand, and not as it is eroticized by male artists.
I think a big point of this film is that it is not pleasant and not easy, not fun or romantic, but painful, confusing, and filled with difficult feelings and disgust.
While the film is beautiful and leaves one with a not unpleasant feeling (it's a good film, the ending is abrupt and funny, but no more so than other great avant-garde or new-wave filmmakers.)
The eroticism can in no way be seen as pornography, though. Despite the explicitness of its photography (of the vagina especially,) there is no actual sex, and these explicit scenes are mixed with other aspects that open them to complex interpretation.
For instance, the main character undresses and experiments by putting red ink on her erogenous zones, but during the whole scene, a fly is very persistently buzzing around the room. I'm not going to go into detail interpreting, but you get my point.
Another very explicit scene, the character in her fantasy, bound with barbed-wire, spread eagled naked on the ground. We see very explicit close-up of her vagina, but this is concurrent with her fantasy lover dangling a live worm over it, and eventually pulling the worm apart and dropping the still squirming bits on her pubis.
Or a scene where walking on the beach to another fantasy, she drops her panties on the decaying corpse of a dog.
Again, interpret for yourself, but you'll see not only a depth of symbol, but a unity of theme in the natural world and decay as related to this young girl's perception of her vagina: something akin to stinky, swampy pit- far from the ripe, juicy peach of male imagination.
It gives what seems to my male mind, a convincing portrayal of early adolescent female sexuality from the perspective of a woman.
The director clearly loves the female form but the film is no more explicit, and certainly less shocking, than say Pasolini's "Salo." (In fact, if Pier had been attracted to women, I suspect he would have given us similarly graphic views instead of tending to orient on penises of extraordinary size.) It's hard to find this film exploitative in comparison to such celebrated films as "Last Tango in Paris."
I could go on and on but the point is, this is not a gray area somewhere near pornography, but a valid, necessary, and probably important (though only history will tell,) work.