**SPOILERS and frank, disturbing details from the film...**
This is Breillat's shock value at its extreme. It could honestly be said that with "Une vraie jeune fille" Breillat makes Jon Waters look like Nora Ephron.
But the movie's actual point seems to be to explore, with an adolescent aptly named Alice, the advent of a young girl's sexuality on a boring family summer vacation to an arid farm. With no real men interested in her sexually (aside from, it is implied, her father, and a lecherous man his age she meets while at the fair), she turns to her own body for entertainment, inventing bizarre autoerotic games for herself, such as walking home with her underwear around her ankles or placing it on rotting dog carcasses. It is an unflinching look at a young girl's exploration of the female body - her own - mindless of the regard of the other.
That said, having first stumbled upon "Une vraie jeune fille" on the "arte" channel the other night in my Paris hotel room, the shock of the images took over any thought processes I was having as to why these visuals were even present and what they represented. There is a scene where the girl's mother unflinchingly saws at a live chicken's neck with a dull kitchen knife, which was obviously not fake (the poor chicken!). In another, Alice puts a bottle of vinegar into her own hind quarters. In one (dream) scene, she writhes tied up on the ground as her love interest tears up an earthworm and places it around (and tries to get it in) her vagina. There are lots more where these came from, but I'm describing these scenes as they are in my mind and not in the "coherent" order in which they appeared in the film, which is unfair to Breillat's intentions. Besides, any further description of the movie might pass as obscene and be edited out of my commentary.
The filmmaker herself has been quoted as saying that she wonders if the spectator can make it beyond the shocking images of her works to the emotions and meaning behind them. It is a tough task she asks of us, especially here. While I liked both "Romance" and "36 Fillette" (there is much rapport avec "jeune fille" ) and find Breillat's feminism thought-provoking to say the least, a film like "Une vraie jeune fille" is just too hard for most people to sit through (I haven't brought myself to eat chicken since seeing "jeune fille," and can't get the rest of the images out of my head). Yet through our participation-voyeurism and the heroines' brutal honesty they tell us a certain raw, in-your-face truth about female sexuality. The question is, can we bear to watch long enough to find that truth?
This is Breillat's shock value at its extreme. It could honestly be said that with "Une vraie jeune fille" Breillat makes Jon Waters look like Nora Ephron.
But the movie's actual point seems to be to explore, with an adolescent aptly named Alice, the advent of a young girl's sexuality on a boring family summer vacation to an arid farm. With no real men interested in her sexually (aside from, it is implied, her father, and a lecherous man his age she meets while at the fair), she turns to her own body for entertainment, inventing bizarre autoerotic games for herself, such as walking home with her underwear around her ankles or placing it on rotting dog carcasses. It is an unflinching look at a young girl's exploration of the female body - her own - mindless of the regard of the other.
That said, having first stumbled upon "Une vraie jeune fille" on the "arte" channel the other night in my Paris hotel room, the shock of the images took over any thought processes I was having as to why these visuals were even present and what they represented. There is a scene where the girl's mother unflinchingly saws at a live chicken's neck with a dull kitchen knife, which was obviously not fake (the poor chicken!). In another, Alice puts a bottle of vinegar into her own hind quarters. In one (dream) scene, she writhes tied up on the ground as her love interest tears up an earthworm and places it around (and tries to get it in) her vagina. There are lots more where these came from, but I'm describing these scenes as they are in my mind and not in the "coherent" order in which they appeared in the film, which is unfair to Breillat's intentions. Besides, any further description of the movie might pass as obscene and be edited out of my commentary.
The filmmaker herself has been quoted as saying that she wonders if the spectator can make it beyond the shocking images of her works to the emotions and meaning behind them. It is a tough task she asks of us, especially here. While I liked both "Romance" and "36 Fillette" (there is much rapport avec "jeune fille" ) and find Breillat's feminism thought-provoking to say the least, a film like "Une vraie jeune fille" is just too hard for most people to sit through (I haven't brought myself to eat chicken since seeing "jeune fille," and can't get the rest of the images out of my head). Yet through our participation-voyeurism and the heroines' brutal honesty they tell us a certain raw, in-your-face truth about female sexuality. The question is, can we bear to watch long enough to find that truth?