Reviews

It's fine. At first i was quite impressed. I thought it looked very beautiful and the soundtrack sounded very good and eery. However as the film went on i started to get the impression that it wasn't going anywhere. Not that i wanted it to go somewhere. It's just one of those films where nothing really happens and it isn't about anything (all of which is good and fine) but the director is perhaps insecure about this nothing quality and decides to spice things up by throwing charades and hints at the audience. As if to say "no this isn't a film about Elizabeth Taylor walking around looking like Robert Smith all the while acting suspiciously and encountering all sorts of crazy people. No actually there is an explanation to everything". And i don't realy care about that. The things that i like about it have no need for justifications and the things i did not like about it only seem even more annoying when i think it is supposed to make sense in the greater scheme of the film. So to sum it up, the film looks very good, Elizabeth Taylor looks great and IS great in it, the overral mood of it is quite amusing and the soundtrack is pretty good. It is however occasionally quite annoying.

Its not good. It is very very long and in very questionable taste. What it is is basically a film about a lowlife police officer who tries to solicit sex from a minor (she's literally fifteen) and ends up almost killing her mentally challenged (i don't know if that is actually the case but it certainly is how the film makes it look) who by the way is implied that he is "mentally challenged" because once he saw his mom having sex. If it sounds stupid that is because it is. Very much so. I will get into the things that bother me. I thought it was weird how the film downplays how the main character is having an affair with a 15 year old girl. I thought that the "reveal" that this 15 year old girl who for no reason whatsoever falls in love with this deadbeat 40 year old cop is actually his ex girlfriend daughter quite hard to swallow. I dont like how the film ridicules her brother by making him seem unreasonable and stupid and i think it comes of as very ableist. I think is very weird how her grandfather literally stalks her and is very obviously turned on by her and by the end of the film they just brush it off as "he wanted to tattoo her and nothing more". Not only that but they even make him seem kind of like the moral compass of the film. I hated the cliched and misoginistic writing of her mother. It is very odd that the film got away with making her the root of all the problems in everyone's life when all that she really did was have sex after she was made widow. Like, what did she do that was so condemnable? And how is that worse than being a police officer who abuses power, harasses sex workers, is directly responsable for one person dying (the jimi hendrix man) and indirectly responsable for one person attempting suicide ? How is that more condemnable than a grandfather who has a stroke after seeing his granddaughter taking a shower because he was so excited? Other than that some of the scenes were very cringy and in bad taste. Such as the scene where her brother tries to kill himself or the one where he hops in joy at his grandfathers funeral.

36 fillette is kind of like A ma soeur (also by Catherine Breillat) but before a ma soeur. I would think that the events that inspired both of them were the same. This one however, in my opinion, has a bit more nuance to the discourse and approaches the theme of sexual initiation from some different angles, some of which i find to be very new and refreshing mainly because they are presented in a way exempt from moralism and filled with ambiguities . The downside in my opinion is that the acting and the directing in this one is not as good as in A ma soeur but that is to be expected since Breillat was not as experienced as a movie director. Also Jean Pierre Lèaud is in this (in a minor role unfortunately) which was a welcome surprise.

Its like Justine by Marquis de Sade except it is a lot more exploitative and a lot less provocative. The film follows Liljia while every possible bad thing happens to her after she is abandoned by her mother (kind of like in Justine). The problem is that a lot of the bad thing that happen to her seem awfully forced. Like how the child protective services just let her go without as much as giving her a general outline of what she could do. I doubt that in the Soviet Union of all places there wouldnt be some sort of program to aid orphans. I also dont think that people are as bad as they are portrayed here. Like literally everyone in this film couldnt care less about Liljia or her friend. He literally dies on the stairs to this one apartment building and the old lady that lives there just jumps him. Like who does something like that? The point i'm making is, i see where the film is going with that and i just dont agree and also i think that if you by any chance do not have such an misanthropist point of view on people a lot of this film just does not make sense. The performances are pretty good and its overral a pretty good film, i just do not like the hopelessness of it. Also the whole "dying and becoming angels" bit felt really awkward and kitsch to me.

I was already expecting it to be kind of silly, still though i was surprised at how silly it would get. I am very thankful that the runtime is just over an hour because i'm not sure whether i would manage to get through it if it were to be 90 or so minutes long. The soundtrack is bad. Really bad. Probably the worst i've ever heard. It makes everything seem sitcom-ish(?) also the sound effects are really not good at all and you can see they were trying really hard to make the effects sound gruesome and gross but i think they overdid it and now it just sounds annoying. I think that the best thing the film has going for it is probably the scenario (which is saying something since it is really generic) but it never really uses it in a good way. The game's rules seem way to lenient. For example that scene where the long haired girl kills the old man. She deliberately disobeyed an order from the king. Wouldn't that be enought to get her disqualified? And if not why wouldn't they just disobey any order that they did not like? Doesn't make sense but okay. The biggest problem though is that the film is just a huge bore. It is like 68 minutes long and still i've had to skip through multiple times because the film insists on reusing scenes that happened 5 or 10 minutes ago. And scenes that were never good to begin with.