Disc Reviews

Jeune & Jolie Review

• 17th Mar 2014

François Ozon is a French director who has an ability to shock with his films; not in any exploitative way but rather in exploring sexuality, gender and relationships. Ozon is still fairly young (at 47 years-young) but has certainly made his mark on French cinema. He directed the erotic coming of age drama Swimming Pool (2003), the Jacques Demy all music inspired 8 Women (2002). The experimental drama 5X2 (2004) and the critically acclaimed 70s set family drama Potiche (2010) starring Catherine Deneuve. Jeune & Jolie (released in the Anglicized Young & Beautiful in the US) goes even further in its subject matter in that it deals with teenage prostitution, or at least that’s the McGuffin.

The film opens on the Côte d’Azur in the South of France as a liberal bourgeois family holidays there. The 17-year-old daughter Isabelle (Marine Vacth) is very beautiful and starts dating and enjoying a summer romance with a German boy, Felix. Felix has sex with Isabelle, takes her virginity. While Isabelle is sexually curious she finds her first sexual experience a not so pleasurable one. Once home Isabelle goes back to college but secretly and inexplicably also becomes an escort going by the name of Lea. She later says that she enjoys chatting on-line with clients and in forums, setting appointments, recceing the outcalls to hotel rendezvous but finds each experience with the client a pretty awful one. However, on thinking about it later she fantasizes about the clients and her next appointment. Many of her tricks treat her like a piece of meat until she meets an older gentleman, Georges who she sees as a regular. Georges treats her with respect until one day during their sexual tryst he dies from heart failure (he also takes Viagra). In a panic and after trying to revive Georges she flees the scene. Later her mother is approached by the police who explain to her about the double life Isabelle has been leading. Devastated the mother berates herself for not seeing any signs or wondering what they had done that led her down this dangerous path. Isabelle had stopped prostituting herself after the death of Georges but of course deals with the trauma this has caused the family and the girl’s blasé attitude to her career choice.

Ozon is a director who clearly knows people and here goes the extra mile. In lead actress Marine Vacth he has a blank canvas as she has a blank face that says lots while also saying nothing. This is even more startlingly realised on the extras as Ozon speaks excitedly and passionately about how the film came about and the meaning behind it while conversely Vacth seems nervous and agitated at speaking about the role and the film to the point of being guarded and while the character of Isabelle/Lea seem guarded they never the less also seem very self-assured, if (again inexplicably) damaged.

Of course this is not the only film to deal with prostitution, but it is one of the better ones over the past few years and one of a number of recent releases to deal with child prostitution. French film expert Ginette Vincendeau had criticized the film in not being honest in dealing with child prostitution but in devil-may-care youth and from the point of a private decision that does not impact on the lives of others as Isabelle sees it this is accurate and correct. From the opening shots Isabelle comes across as a girl in sexual awakening with the normal teenage angst and disassociation from her parents to a ruthlessly cold sex provider not believing she is harming anyone but herself. The film has a precedent in Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), perhaps the best film to deal with the subject of prostitution – and Ozon makes reference to it here in one shot in a montage with clients (the one that appears on the films poster and DVD cover) that references the scene in which we the viewer thinks Catherine Deneuve’s character in the older film is upset at what has happened and then we see the post-coital satisfaction on her face – subtle but relevant. Elsewhere Ozon wanted to use Deneuve in the climactic scene in which Georges wife arranges to meet Isabelle but prudently he decides to use Ozon regular, Charlotte Rampling; using Deneuve would have been too obvious.

A pleasantly surprising film that delivers what one would expect from Ozon but is even more satisfying than many of his more recent efforts and probably shares closer links to the siren-like Virginie Ledoyen in Swimming Pool.

Chris Hick