rating:
(out of
4 stars)France; 1976
Directed by Catherine Breillat; screenplay by Catherine Breillat
Starring Charlotte Alexandra, Hiram Keller, Rita Maiden, Bruno Balp, Georges Guéret, Shirley Stoler
Catherine Breillat's first attempt to an exploration of female adolescent sexuality is interesting as part of the director's body of work, not for the film itself. 'Une vraie jeune fille' is a surreal film, where fantasy and reality are mixed (I thought of Luis Buñuel's 'Belle de jour' from time to time), but not to great success. Based on her own novel, the film shows Breillat as an experimenting director, pushing the limits when it comes to sexual images. The general idea works, up to a point, but in the end crushes under the not-engaging narrative.
The young girl (Charlotte Alexandra) is home for vacation. She is bored and that gives her plenty of time to explore her own sexuality, both in real life as in het fantasies. Whether we are in a fantasy or not is not always very clear at first. We see her in submissive fantasies most of the time (hands the thought of 'Belle de jour'), although there is no real coherence in the things she thinks about. The relationship with her father (Bruno Balp), the dominating male in her life, is close to the incestuous. She falls in love, if that is the right choice of words, with one of his co-workers (Hiram Keller).
We never really care for any of the characters, and in that way, not for the lives and fantasies. The viewer is kept distant, but this is not used as an advantage as with Breillat's later work. If the young girl would get at least our fascination, we would be able to except her weird fantasies and therefore the ideas of the writer/director. As with all her films, I was never bored. The single images have their good aspects, but as whole it is more like a weird experiment than a real film.