Fat Girl

Fat Girl (French: À ma sœur!, lit. 'To My Sister!') is a 2001 drama film written and directed by Catherine Breillat, and starring Anaïs Reboux and Roxane Mesquida. It was released in certain English-speaking countries under the alternative titles For My Sister and Story of a Whale.[2] The film's plot follows two young sisters as they deal with coming-of-age, sibling rivalry, and desire while on vacation with their family.

For the musical number, see Fat Girl (composition).

Fat Girl
Theatrical release poster
FrenchÀ ma sœur!
Directed byCatherine Breillat
Written byCatherine Breillat
Produced byJean-François Lepetit
Starring
CinematographyYorgos Arvanitis
Edited byPascale Chavance
Music by
  • Fabrice Nguyen Thai
  • Jean-Paul Jamot
Production
companies
Distributed by
Release dates
  • 10 February 2001 (2001-02-10) (Berlin)
  • 7 March 2001 (2001-03-07) (France)
  • 15 June 2001 (2001-06-15) (Italy)
Running time
86 minutes
CountriesFrance
Italy
LanguagesFrench
Italian
English
Box office$765,705[1]

Plot

Anaïs and her older sister, Elena, are vacationing with their parents on the French seaside. Bored of staying in their vacation home, the two walk into town while discussing relationships and their virginities. Although the conventionally attractive Elena has been promiscuous, she is saving actual intercourse for someone who loves her, while overweight Anaïs thinks it is better to lose one's virginity to a "nobody" just to get it over with.

They meet an Italian law student, Fernando, at a cafe. Later, Fernando sneaks into the girls' bedroom for a liaison with Elena. Anaïs is awake and watches their entire interaction. After a conversation about Fernando's previous relationships with other women, Elena consents to have sex with him but backs out at the last minute. Frustrated, Fernando pressures her through various means, including threatening to sleep with some other woman just to alleviate himself. Finally, Elena is coerced into anal sex as a "proof of love," although it is obviously a painful experience for her.

In the morning, Fernando asks for oral sex from Elena before he leaves, but Anaïs has had enough and tells them to let her sleep in peace. The next day, the girls and Fernando go to the beach. Anaïs sits in the ocean in her new dress and sings to herself while Elena and Fernando go off alone together. Later, as the girls are reminiscing about their childhood together back at the house, Elena reveals Fernando gave her a ring while at the beach. Anaïs openly expresses her suspicions about Fernando's intentions. That night, Elena gives up her virginity to Fernando as Anaïs silently cries on the other side of the room. Much of this scene is filmed from Anaïs's perspective.

Later, Fernando's mother arrives at the vacation house, asking for the ring Fernando gave to Elena back, as it belongs to her and is one of a collection of pieces of jewellery from past lovers that she keeps. On discovering Elena and Fernando's relationship, her mother angrily decides to drive back from Les Mathes to their home in Paris. On the way back, she becomes tired and decides to sleep at a rest stop, where a man smashes the windshield of their car with an axe, kills Elena, and strangles their mother while ripping her clothes. When Anaïs gets out of the car and starts backing away, he takes Anaïs into the woods and rapes her. When the police arrive the next morning, Anaïs, recalling her conversation with Elena about virginity, insists he did not rape her.

Cast

Production

Breillat's experience during principal photography inspired her 2002 film Sex Is Comedy, which revolves around shooting a sex scene from the film. Mesquida reprised the scene for the later film. Principal photography took place in Les Mathes, France[3] from late 1999 to early 2000.[4]

Catherine Breillat revealed she had a big concern about censorship because in the movie you could see Anaïs's breasts. "I actually wanted her not to have breasts, but her body changed between casting and the end of shooting. It's funny that, if she had been flat-chested, it wouldn't have been an issue", the director said.[5]

Release

Critical reception

The film received generally positive reviews from critics. Rotten Tomatoes reports an approval rating of 73% based on 86 reviews, with an average rating of 6.4/10. The site's consensus reads: "The controversial Fat Girl is an unflinchingly harsh but powerful look at female adolescence."[6] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 77 out of 100 based on 24 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[7]

Fat Girl got an "A" from Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly[8] and was called a "startling vision of the prickly crawlspace between innocence and sexual awakening" by Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine.[9] Carla Meyer of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote the film "[e]xposes the less sexy things that lust can awaken, like viciousness, deceit and amoral longing".[10]

Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote "Reboux's extraordinary performance conveys Anaïs's mixture of precocious insight, animal canniness and vulnerability so powerfully that it ranks among the richest screen portrayals of a child ever filmed".[11] In a review for Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert wrote "There is a jolting surprise in discovering that this film has free will, and can end as it wants, and that its director can make her point, however brutally".[12]

David Stratton of Variety praised the cinematography by Yorgos Arvanitis, calling the film "beautifully photographed and framed".[13] Neil Smith of BBC said that "Breillat has fashioned another characteristically raw and honest portrait of sexual relations".[14]

Controversy

Fat Girl was initially banned in Ontario by the Ontario Film Review Board in late 2001 due to objections regarding the frank representation of teenage sexuality.[15] Wheeler Winston Dixon described the film as a "harrowing tale of a 13-year-old girl's coming of age as her 15-year-old sister embarks on a series of sexual relationships", featuring "explicit sexual scenes" in a "brutal narrative structure."[16] The ban in Canada was eventually overturned and the film played in several theatres in 2003.[17]

In the UK, the British Board of Film Classification approved the uncut film for cinema release, but for the video release ordered the removal of the final rape scene where Anaïs appears to consent to being raped: "Cut required to scene of sexual assault on young girl to address the specific danger that video enables the scene to be used to stimulate and validate abusive action".[18] In contrast to viewing the film in the cinema, where users cannot reuse the images they are seeing, the BBFC was concerned that at home "the rape sequence could potentially be used by paedophiles to 'groom' their victims"[19] by demonstrating to children how to submit to rape. As Douglas Keesey explains, "in the midst of the rape, Anaïs stops trying to push the rapist off with her arms and instead puts them around his shoulders in an embrace. If our point of identification in the scene is Anaïs, has she just moved from fighting to acceptance of the rape? It could be argued that she ‘acquiesces’ solely to ensure her survival, but one can see how the BBFC might be concerned about a paedophile viewer showing Anaïs’ embrace of her rapist to a potential victim as a model of how to consent to rape. This concern is only heightened right after this scene when we find out that Anaïs herself claims that she ‘wasn’t raped’."[20]

Accolades

In 2001, the film won the Manfred Salzgeber Award at the 51st Berlin International Film Festival[21] and the France Culture Award at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.[22]

References
  1. "Fat Girl (2001)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 13 August 2021.
  2. "Fat Girl (2001)". Turner Classic Movie Database. Retrieved 1 February 2023.
  3. "Fat Girl (2001)". Spotern.com. Retrieved 18 December 2021.
  4. Rich, Ruby. "End of Innocence". Filmmaker. No. Fall 2001. Retrieved 18 December 2021.
  5. "The joy of sex". The Guardian. 23 November 2001. Retrieved 28 January 2022.
  6. "Fat Girl (2001)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 13 August 2021.
  7. "Fat Girl Reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved 13 August 2021.
  8. Schwarzbaum, Lisa (17 March 2020). "Fat Girl". Entertainment Weekly.
  9. Gonzalez, Ed (26 September 2001). "Review: Fat Girl". Slant Magazine.
  10. Meyer, Carla (30 November 2001). "A sisterhood both powerful and bitter / 'Fat Girl' an extraordinary inquiry into sex". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 13 August 2021.
  11. Holden, Stephen (8 October 2001). "Film Festival Review; Adolescent Fantasies, Rough Real Life". The New York Times. p. 3. Retrieved 1 February 2023.
  12. Ebert, Roger (23 November 2001). "Fat Girl". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 13 August 2021.
  13. Stratton, David (15 February 2001). "Fat Girl". Variety.
  14. Smith, Neil (4 December 2001). "A Ma Soeur! (2001)". BBC. Retrieved 13 August 2021.
  15. Conlogue, Ray (14 November 2001). "Film review board blocks Fat Girl again". The Globe and Mail. Archived from the original on 14 April 2021. Retrieved 21 December 2021.
  16. Dixon, Wheeler Winston (2003). Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema. Wallflower Press. p. 112. ISBN 978-1903364383.
  17. Adams, James (30 January 2003). "Ontario backs down over film ban". The Globe and Mail. Archived from the original on 14 April 2021. Retrieved 21 December 2021.
  18. "A Ma Soeur!". British Board of Film Classification. Retrieved 29 January 2023.
  19. "Film Cuts: A ma soeur!". melonfarmers.co.uk. Retrieved 29 January 2023.
  20. Keesey, Douglas (2010). "Split identification: Representations of rape in Gaspar Noé's Irréversible and Catherine Breillat's A ma sæur!/Fat Girl". Studies in European Cinema. 7 (2): 95–107, p.101. doi:10.1386/seci.7.2.95_1. S2CID 8551632.
  21. "Tartan picks up Fat Girl for UK release". Screen Daily. 19 February 2001. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
  22. "awards & festivals | FAT GIRL". Mubi.

Further reading
  • Horeck, Tanya (2010). "Shame and the Sisters: Catherine Breillat's À Ma Sœur! (Fat Girl)". In Russell, Dominique (ed.). Rape in Art Cinema. New York: Continuum. pp. 195–209. ISBN 978-0-82-642967-4.
  • Keesey, Douglas (2010). "Split identification: Representations of rape in Gaspar Noé's Irréversible and Catherine Breillat's A ma sœur!/Fat Girl". Studies in European Cinema. 7 (2): 95–107. doi:10.1386/seci.7.2.95_1. S2CID 8551632.
  • Krisjansen, Ivan; Maddock, Trevor (2003). "Surrealist poetics and the cinema of evil: the significance of the expression of sovereignty in Catherine Breillat's A ma sœur (2001)". Studies in French Cinema. 3 (3): 161–171. doi:10.1386/sfci.3.3.161/1. S2CID 193228926.
  • Wheatley, Catherine (2010). "Contested Interactions: Watching Catherine Breillat's Scenes of Sexual Violence". Journal for Cultural Research. 14 (1): 27–41. doi:10.1080/14797580903363066. S2CID 143522190.
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