Rating: 4/5
Criterion Challenge 2024 | 49/52 | 2000s
Oh, jeez, what am I getting myself into?
No one would think we're sisters. It's true. We don't take after anyone. It's like we're born of ourselves. It's funny. We have nothing in common…
Anaïs, age 12, watches with disdain her older sister, Elena, age 15, sing a song about finding anyone, including a werewolf, who might love her. They are on vacation with their parents. Later, the two walk into town. Anaïs tells Elena why she can’t find anyone who sticks around. Elena remarks on Anaïs’s weight as to why she can’t even meet anyone. Elena challenges whoever can see the first guy, decent or otherwise. Though Elena hooks up with guys, she doesn’t have sex with them. Meanwhile, Anaïs wants to lose her virginity before she meets someone she loves—she doesn’t want some guy bragging that he got there first.
They arrive at a cafe, where a college boy named Fernando asks Anaïs to sit down. Through an awkward exchange, Elena sits next to Fernando, and Anaïs sits across from them. Elena orders a coffee, while Anaïs orders a banana split. Elena keeps her eyes fixed on Fernando. She explains that she will be a junior in high school, which only entices Fernando more. The two make out while Anaïs eats her dessert. They leave Anaïs at the restaurant, driving off in Fernando’s nice car. Anaïs waits at the gate for her sister’s arrival and the two embrace.
When I hate you, I look at you, and then I can't. It's like hating part of myself. That's why I loathe you so violently—because you ought to be like me.
Fernando joins them at their vacation house, meeting their parents. Their father talks to Fernando about his plans after college. Elena comments on how out of shape he is, pivoting to Anaïs and her eating habits. Finally, their mother comes to Anaïs’s defense, saying her weight is “hormonal.” Later, everyone sunbathes around the pool except for their father, who takes business calls, and Anaïs, who swims and practices kissing on the stair railing and a wooden dock, switching between the two as though they are two jealous lovers.
That night, Elena puts on makeup in bed, waking up Anaïs. She sneaks Fernando in, who climbs into bed with her. They kiss, and he promises to see her, learn French, and all that. He fails at taking off her bra, so she helps him. But when she clarifies that she won’t have sex with him, their dynamic grows more tense and frightening. Anaïs watches, pretending to be asleep.
The film follows that evening and the days that follow on vacation.
It's sick that people think it's their business. It's sick being a virgin.
If you’ve seen any from Catherine Breillat, you know she has no problem with sexually explicit imagery. Though several French directors at the time experimented with explicitness, Breillat set the standard, for better or worse. Here, she adds another level of discomfort as we watch in real-time as an adult coerces a 15-year-old into having anal sex with him (Roxane Mesquida, who played Elena, was 20 at the time). Whenever penetrative sex occurs, however, the camera focuses on Anaïs and her response.
The cinematography rides the line between representation and exploitation. Part of the male gaze is the chopping up of women’s bodies through the editing process—here, the real-time experience diminishes all sensuality, leaving us with the raw physical experience. It’s a perverse feminism, in a way, in that it accurately portrays the victimhood of women under a patriarchal order but conceives of SA as a means of liberation.
The film posits that the disconnected parents, who believe that a vacation in and of itself will resolve all familial tensions, are the root of their children’s messed up sense of sexuality. The mother is rigidly aloof but blows up when she feels any sort of disrespect. The father is prone to anger, is always busy with work, and resents his family for not appreciating what he does for them. Let me guess—they grow up hating their mother and longing for their absent father.
Anaïs Reboux was not an actress before this movie and has not done any other film I know. She’s incredible in this—she is a perfect example of why so many directors go for non-actors because she makes performance choices that most actors wouldn’t. It could be unintentional, but it culminates in a painfully realistic depiction. Like, the way she laughs — I genuinely wondered if she laughed in a take, and they kept it because it feels so organic and aimless in that way a child gets the giggles.
The score is fucking insane. Every time it kicks in, it sounds like a kid’s movie. It eventually isn’t, but it threw me every time it came in.
The third act is.. like, I can’t say a word. I’ll say more in the spoiler zone below. Regardless, this movie is a singular experience.
** SPOILER ZONE **
I can see the ending as Anaïs’s fantasy, in that childish sort of way — her mother and sister, whom she hates at the moment, are murdered, and then a nobody who murdered them takes her virginity, thus fulfilling her wish. Deeply fucked up. I can see someone changing their whole review based on it.