After the controversial "anti-porn film" Romance, director Catherine Breillat confounded skeptics by returning to the territory of troubled female adolescence explored in her earliest work like 36 fillette and A Real Young Girl. Though technically less explicit than its predecessor, Fat Girl (á Ma Soeur!) is an even darker and more upsetting film as it explores the murky terrain of budding womanhood from two different, equally destructive vantage points. While Elena's vulnerability may be a subject already well covered by made-for-TV films and countless psychological manuals, the dangerous combination of fantasy, delusion and carnal longing within Anaïs is certainly a cinematic first. The sex scenes are intense and fairly explicit, though they don't really tip over the border into hardcore like Romance; significantly, Breillat had so many performance problems with De Rienzo (including the use of a certain prosthetic enhancement) that she later channeled her frustration into the much lighter Sex Is Comedy, which would make an ideal second feature.
For many viewers the harsh, slasher-style ending comes out of left field, though the vicious, bleak tone it imposes on the rest of the film in retrospect is essential to understanding Breillat's modus operandi. (One has to wonder whether the makers of Haute tension saw this before starting their own cinematic venture.) How successful she was in the end will be a matter of taste; it's not an easy film to watch, much less like, but it certainly leaves its mark and is essential viewing for devotees of both provocative art house fare and twisted sleaze. Significantly, the final act proved too much for British censors who completely excised the vital penultimate sequence from the film, rendering its final moments completely incoherent. Fortunately the earlier British DVD is rendered obsolete by Criterion's disc, which once again fearlessly presents a film most distributors would rather not touch.
The anamorphic transfer and subtitles on the Criterion disc are all top notch as usual; considering this film was swallowed up in the bankruptcy of its American distributor, Cowboy, one has to be grateful it's seen the light of day again at all. The Dolby Digital track can be played in 5.1 or two-channel stereo; there's not much difference until the last fifteen minutes when the former really comes into play.
Extras include a five-minute behind-the-scenes featurette combining raw set footage with Breillat's comments, an 11-minute Breillat interview shot for European television in which she discusses her intentions for the film and her views as a director, the French and U.S. trailers, and a new Breillat interview, running 9 minutes, in which she discusses an alternate ending (basically the same scene transferred to a doctor's office) and her views on the film from a greater vantage point of a few years down the line. An insert booklet contains an essay by Ginette Vincendeau and a Breillat interview, as well as a note from the director on the story behind the film's wildly different French and English titles (she prefers the latter).
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by Nathaniel Thompson
