The other night, I ate gruyere on ciabatta baguette as I watched this:
First of all, can I just say that almost everything I see written about this movie is dead wrong? Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage... Um, did we watch the same movie? Sexual rampage? Suzanne, the main character, has two or three on-camera relationships (no sex shown) with boys, meant to imply that she's a goddamn teenager with a head full of hormones and a troubled relationship with monogamy. She's hardly banging hobos for kicks, y'all. The Netflix blurb is even worse, and makes it sound like a movie about child abuse. Again, what? Of all the themes to focus on -- growing up, being sexually precocious, dealing with your parents' divorce, dealing with puberty -- who decides that the reason the sweet little girl suddenly becomes a turboslut is because she gets smacked by her dad?
At any rate, French cinema is kind of ridiculous. All the reviewers also laud this film as being super edgy and original ("Pialat is the French Cassavetes!"), except it's sort of a self-conscious retelling of 200 Blows and every Francois Sagan novel ever (especially Bonjour Tristesse). Also, the Freudianism is overwhelming and painfully heavy-handed ("Ha ha ha, when he says 'moment,' it sounds just like 'mommy!'"). Everyone is in love with Suzanne -- her dad, her brother, her brother's friends -- but Suzanne only really loves her dad, who's selectively protective and ultimately a bombastic, self-important turd (played by the director, of course, ho hum). Her mom is the menopausal, hysterical wicked witch of the west. I'd be more upset by this schematic treatment of familial relationships (again, all the reviews I've read are really into the "painfully real" family dynamics) -- except this is essentially exactly how my aunt's family functioned. She married young, had two adorable blond daughters, had a terrible relationship with her husband, went totally hysterical nutzoid, husband left for another woman, daughters who were already painfully damaged by years of bad family mojo proceeded to go off the deep end. I've seen that exact look of hollow trauma in their faces, and I can't help link their desperate and predatory relationships with men to the missing father figure in their lives. So, I spent the entire movie-watching experience wavering between "this is stupid, no family really works like this" and "well, shit, maybe Pialat really is onto something." I'm still trying to work that out.
Anyway! Do you know Sandrine Bonnaire?
Because you should. She's sort of the Lindsay Lohan of the 80s French cinema scene, except instead of starring in some terrible stripper movie and then dipping back down into the cocaine spiral as her "comeback," Bonnaire did one of the best, most gut-wrenching, teeth-gnashing movies of all time:
She's fantastic in both, of course, but I love her in this film. Her honest, sensual, but slightly haunted face works so well as a canvas for all those familiar teenage-girl emotions to which we of the fairer sex can, I'm sure, all relate -- wanting sex, feeling dirty for wanting sex, wanting sex even more for feeling dirty for wanting sex... At one point, the line "I'm not 15 anymore" is uttered, and it just hits home. So. Hard. God, that incredible dilation of time between the ages of 13 and 21, when a year can seem like an eternity of hard-fought experience. Which, I guess, is ultimately the biggest problem with this film, because in true French fashion, it tries to allegorize this localized temporal experience in a really dumb way. Pialat makes "I'm bored, I'm fed up, I want to kill myself" sound like an existential statement, rather than the typically tempestuous psyche of a prematurely jaded teenager. But for those of us who have been there, it's both a delicious vindication (I wasn't the only teenage turboslut!) and a confrontation with the little monster we once were (only once...?). If only for that (and Sandrine Bonnaire!), definitely worth a watch.
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