''Fat Girl'' () is a 2001
coming-of-age
Coming of age is a young person's transition from being a child to being an adult. The specific age at which this transition takes place varies between societies, as does the nature of the change. It can be a simple legal convention or can b ...
drama
Drama is the specific Mode (literature), mode of fiction Mimesis, represented in performance: a Play (theatre), play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on Radio drama, radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a g ...
film written and directed by
Catherine Breillat
Catherine Breillat (; born 13 July 1948) is a French filmmaker, novelist and professor of auteur cinema at the European Graduate School.
Life and career
Breillat was born in Bressuire, Deux-Sèvres, but grew up in Niort. She decided to becom ...
, and starring Anaïs Reboux and
Roxane Mesquida
Roxane Mesquida (born 1 October 1981) is a French actress and model based in Los Angeles.
Mesquida grew up in Le Pradet, a little town located in southern France. Her mother, writer Françoise Mesquida, is French/Spanish and her father is Ital ...
. It was released in certain
English-speaking countries
The English-speaking world comprises the 88 countries and territories in which English is an official, administrative, or cultural language. In the early 2000s, between one and two billion people spoke English, making it the largest language ...
under the alternative titles ''For My Sister'' and ''Story of a Whale''. 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.
Plot
Twelve-year-old Anaïs and her fifteen-year-old sister, Elena, are vacationing with their parents in the French seaside town of
Les Mathes. 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 would rather lose her virginity to a man she does not love.
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 another woman just to relieve 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 together back at the house about their childhood, Elena reveals Fernando gave her an engagement ring while at the beach. Anaïs openly expresses her suspicions about Fernando's intentions. That night, Elena loses her virginity to Fernando as Anaïs silently cries on the other side of the room.
Later, Fernando's mother stops by the vacation house, asking for the return of the ring Fernando gave to Elena, as it belongs to her and is part of a collection of pieces of jewelry from past lovers that she keeps. On discovering Elena and Fernando's relationship, her mother angrily decides to drive back 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 exits the car and starts backing away, he takes Anaïs into the woods and rapes her. When the police arrive the next morning, Anaïs insists she was not raped.
Cast
* Anaïs Reboux as Anaïs Pingot
*
Roxane Mesquida
Roxane Mesquida (born 1 October 1981) is a French actress and model based in Los Angeles.
Mesquida grew up in Le Pradet, a little town located in southern France. Her mother, writer Françoise Mesquida, is French/Spanish and her father is Ital ...
as Elena Pingot
*
Libero De Rienzo
Libero De Rienzo (24 February 1977 – 15 July 2021) was an Italian film actor, director and screenwriter.
Career
De Rienzo was born in Naples and raised in Rome. In 2001, De Rienzo appeared in three films: '' Fat Girl'', ''Gioco con la morte'' ...
as Fernando
*
Arsinée Khanjian
Arsinée Khanjian (Western Armenian: Արսինէ Խանճեան, Eastern Armenian: Արսինե Խանջյան; ; born 6 September 1958) is a Lebanese-Canadian actress and activist. She is widely known for her collaborations with her husband, ...
as Mrs. Pingot
*
Romain Goupil
Romain-Pierre Charpentier (born 12 July 1951 in Paris), known professionally as Romain Goupil, is a French filmmaker. He was a college leader during the May 1968 civil unrest in France and was for a long time a trotskyist militant. During the 2000 ...
as François Pingot
*
Laura Betti
Laura Betti ( Trombetti; May 1 1934 – 31 July 2004) was an Italian actress known particularly for her work with directors Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bernardo Bertolucci. She had a long friendship with Pasolini and made a docume ...
as Fernando's mother
* Albert Goldberg as the killer
Production
Catherine Breillat
Catherine Breillat (; born 13 July 1948) is a French filmmaker, novelist and professor of auteur cinema at the European Graduate School.
Life and career
Breillat was born in Bressuire, Deux-Sèvres, but grew up in Niort. She decided to becom ...
's experience during principal photography inspired her 2002 film ''
Sex Is Comedy
''Sex Is Comedy'' is a 2002 comedy-drama film written and directed by Catherine Breillat. It revolves around a director (Anne Parillaud) and her troubles filming an intimate sex scene between two actors who cannot tolerate each other.
Based on ...
'', 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 from late 1999 to early 2000.
Breillat revealed she was concerned about censorship because Anaïs's breasts are displayed in the final scene of the film. "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", Breillat said.
Reception
Critical response
The film received generally positive reviews from critics. On the
review aggregator
A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews and ratings of products and services, such as films, books, video games, music, software, hardware, or cars. This system then stores the reviews to be used for supporting a website where user ...
website
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review aggregator, review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee ...
, the film holds an approval rating of 74% based on 87 reviews, with an average rating of 6.5/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "The controversial ''Fat Girl'' is an unflinchingly harsh but powerful look at female adolescence."
Metacritic
Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...
, which uses a
weighted average
The weighted arithmetic mean is similar to an ordinary arithmetic mean (the most common type of average), except that instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others. The ...
, assigned the film a score of 77 out of 100, based on 24 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
''Fat Girl'' got an "A" from
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Lisa Schwarzbaum (born July 5, 1952) is an American film critic. She joined ''Entertainment Weekly'' as a senior writer in 1991, working as a film critic for the magazine alongside Owen Gleiberman from 1995 to 2013.
Early life
Lisa Schwarzbaum w ...
of ''
Entertainment Weekly
''Entertainment Weekly'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''EW'') is an American online magazine, digital-only entertainment magazine based in New York City, published by Dotdash Meredith, that covers film, television, music, Broadway theatre, books, ...
'' and was called a "startling vision of the prickly crawlspace between innocence and sexual awakening" by Ed Gonzalez of ''
Slant Magazine
''Slant Magazine'' is an American online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians. The site covers various film festivals like the New Yor ...
''. Carla Meyer of the ''
San Francisco Chronicle
The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and M. H. de Young, Michael H. ...
'' wrote the film "
poses the less sexy things that lust can awaken, like viciousness, deceit and amoral longing".
Stephen Holden
Stephen Holden (born July 18, 1941) is an American writer, poet, and music and film critic.
Biography
Holden earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Yale University in 1963. He worked as a photo editor, staff writer, and eventually be ...
of ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' 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". In a review for ''
Chicago Sun-Times
The ''Chicago Sun-Times'' is a daily nonprofit newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Since 2022, it is the flagship paper of Chicago Public Media, and has long held the second largest circulation among Chicago newspaper ...
''
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert ( ; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American Film criticism, film critic, film historian, journalist, essayist, screenwriter and author. He wrote for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. Eber ...
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".
David Stratton
David James Stratton (born 1939) is an English-Australian film critic and historian. He has also worked as a journalist, interviewer, educator, television personality, and producer. His career as a film critic, writer, and educator in Austral ...
of ''
Variety
Variety may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats
* Variety (radio)
* Variety show, in theater and television
Films
* ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont
* ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...
'' praised the cinematography by
Yorgos Arvanitis, calling the film "beautifully photographed and framed". Neil Smith of
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
said that "Breillat has fashioned another characteristically raw and honest portrait of sexual relations".
Accolades
In 2001, the film won the Manfred Salzgeber Award at the
51st Berlin International Film Festival
The 51st annual Berlin International Film Festival was held from February 7 to 18, 2001. The festival opened with war-drama film ''Enemy at the Gates'' by Jean-Jacques Annaud. 70 mm restored version of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 Sci-fi film '' 2001: ...
and the France Culture Award at the
2001 Cannes Film Festival
The 54th Cannes Film Festival took place from 9 to 20 May 2001. Norwegian actress and director Liv Ullmann was named Jury President for the main competition. Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti won the ''Palme d'Or'' for the drama film '' The Son's ...
.
Controversy
''Fat Girl'' was initially banned in the Canadian province of
Ontario
Ontario is the southernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Located in Central Canada, Ontario is the Population of Canada by province and territory, country's most populous province. As of the 2021 Canadian census, it ...
by the
Ontario Film Review Board
The Ontario Film Review Board () is an inactive agency of the government of the Canadian province of Ontario that was formerly responsible for that province's motion picture rating system. Until 2015, the board reported to the Minister of Consu ...
in late 2001 due to objections regarding the frank representation of teenage sexuality.
Wheeler Winston Dixon
Wheeler Winston Dixon (born March 12, 1950) is an American filmmaker and scholar. He is an expert on film history, Film theory, theory and Film criticism, criticism.Bill Goodykoontz, December 23, 2012, USA TodayDefining Tarantino Accessed Aug. 25, ...
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."
The ban in the province was eventually overturned and the film played in several theatres there in 2003.
In the United Kingdom, the
British Board of Film Classification
The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is a non-governmental organization, non-governmental organisation founded by the British film industry in 1912 and responsible for the national classification and censorship of films exhibited ...
(BBFC) 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". 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" 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'."
References
Further reading
*
*
*
*
External links
*
*
''Fat Girl: Sisters, Sex, and Sitcom''– an essay by
Ginette Vincendeau
Ginette Vincendeau (born 1948) is a French-born British-based academic who is a professor of film studies at King's College London.
Early life and education
Vincendeau was educated at the Lycée Lamartine and Lycée Sophie Germain in Paris, ...
at
The Criterion Collection
The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home video, home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". A "sister company" of art film, arth ...
''Fat Girl: About the Title''– an essay by Catherine Breillat at The Criterion Collection
Press kitfrom Flach Film
{{Gold Hugo
2001 drama films
2001 films
2001 independent films
2001 multilingual films
2000s coming-of-age drama films
2000s English-language films
2000s French films
2000s French-language films
2000s Italian films
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Arte France Cinéma films
English-language French films
English-language Italian films
Films about obesity
Films about puberty
Films about rape in France
Films about sexual repression
Films about sisters
Films about vacationing
Films about virginity
Films directed by Catherine Breillat
Films set in Nouvelle-Aquitaine
Films shot in Charente-Maritime
Films shot in Essonne
French coming-of-age drama films
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