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L'adolescence nue, as Pialat would have it, thus the Catherine Breillat heroine, "well-developed for her age." The sullen teenager (Charlotte Alexandra) stares with contempt at the froggy adults riding the train with her, the same contempt is spiked with a drop of envy as she listens to the saccharine pop tune on the radio ("Suis-je une petite fille..."). Summer at the farm with the folks (Rita Maiden, Bruno Balp), the boredom of their meal together is only broken when the spoon finds its way between the daughter's legs. Helping out at the chicken coop, she crushes an egg in her hand and contemplates the yolk running through her fingers, one of various fluids she's to smear over the course of the fable. Semen, blood, urine, vomit, ear wax... "Disgust makes me lucid." Beauty pockmarked by decay, titillation gnarled by repulsion—the beach is a postcard vista defaced by looming industrial cranes and canine carcasses, the buzzing sound of flies is never far from pubic close-ups. Stall discoveries in the girls' dormitory, on and off with the sawmill hunk (Hiram Keller), abrupt caricatures of Lolita and Mouchette. Not just the conflict of puberty but the violence of it for the precocious misanthrope in the community of stuck insects, "I only like seeing myself in small portions." Mom's on the verge, Dad's too close for comfort, the dreamboat turns out to be a boar and is punished accordingly. The unzipped beast on the carousel, the worms of youth. "Symbols don't scare me." From the very start, innocence to Breillat is an imaginary state, something to yearn for while confronting life, one orifice at a time. With Georges Guéret and Shirley Stoler.
--- Fernando F. Croce |