A Real Young Girl (1976)
Catherine Breillat’s banned 1976 debut: a bored teen’s summer of sticky, unfiltered sexual self-discovery in the French pines — beautiful, filthy, and deeply uncomfortable.
Alice Bonnard, 14, comes home from boarding school to the Landes forest for the summer of 1963, and tells us straight off in voiceover that she hates it here because she’s bored out of her skull. With nothing to do, her adolescent itch fixes on Jim, a surly young worker at her father’s sawmill, and what follows is an increasingly transgressive, sexually experimental push-pull between them. Breillat — adapting her own semi-autobiographical novel Le soupirail, with Alexandra’s voice dubbed by the director’s older sister — shoots it like a diary nobody was meant to read: long, flat, sun-baked provincial afternoons in the pine country of southwest France, then a hard cut to something you can’t unsee, with fantasy and reality deliberately smeared together. Alice’s burgeoning sexuality expresses itself in random ways...
— sometimes involving an earthworm — but it’s always really about refusing to be told what to do. This was her taboo-busting debut, finished in 1976 and then shelved over censorship concerns; banned in numerous countries, it didn’t reach cinemas until 2000, which makes it a genuine time capsule of post-’68 French provocation, only from the girl’s side of the bed for once.
Here’s the thing about Charlotte Alexandra: she was a physically mature 20-year-old playing 14, and she doesn’t do coy. Not a conventional beauty and completely unbothered about her body, she’s genuinely unforgettable in her only leading role as a surly, aggressive girl testing her sexuality in every direction available — pouty mouth, dead-eyed stare, cheap summer dress, the kind of allure that comes from sheer indifference to whether you approve. And the explicitness is not softcore teasing: the film is notorious for graphic sex, with Alexandra exposing her breasts and vulva and the male actors fully exposed too, including explicit close-ups that got it buried for over two decades. Watch it because it’s the origin story of the woman who’d later make *Romance* and *Fat Girl*, because it’s one of the few films that treats a teenage girl’s dirty mind as her own property, and because it’s flat-out weirder and funnier than its reputation suggests. Not one for date night. Bring the whiskey.
Reluctantly, a sulky adolescent returns to her parents’ house for yet another boring summer vacation, dabbling in desire and the art of desirability, eventually mixing reality with vision, caged fantasies with the fierce female sexuality.
Sign in to comment
The same account you use to watch films.