Director: Catherine Breillait
"For me, the outrage is that the world needs to know about the loss of virginity. There is such guilt associated with the fact that you want to make love, that you demand that your lover speaks words of love, whether he means them or not." Catherine Breillait
Fat Girl is the type of film where you realize the director really has an ax to grind. Or at least a point to make. What that point is though is entirely up to the audience to decide.
Twelve-year-old Anais is an overweight and unloved (but not sad) girl who is on vacation with her oblivious parents and her sister Elena. Elena is rather attractive (in fact, they look nothing alike - C'est cinema!) and she gets all the attention and hence all the boys.
The film has two major scenes that define the movie: The first is an early scene where the two are staying in their vacation home and Elena brings over an older guy who throws Elena every line in the book to get her to take her clothes off. We listen and cringe and so to does Anais who lies in bed at the other end of the room trying to sleep.The scene goes on much longer than it needs to because the point is made early - this guy (a typical 'guy' if ever there was one) is a creep and the two girls have to experience his disingenuous romantic talk.
The second defining scene is the final scene, which not only throws the film into the horror genre but makes us question everything we have seen up to that point. Director Catherine Breillait almost always likes to throw the audience out of her films with violence means. Here she's up to her old tricks only this time not many people are buying it.
**Warning Ending is given away here**
The only way I can justify the end is if we accept Anais' dark desire to lose her virginity to the man who kills her her sister and her mother. This is a deep dark mythical reading of the film but - to me - it is the only one I can accept - otherwise it's all a sham.
Matt Langdon
Director: Lucrecia Martel
"La Cienaga doesn't obey conventional narrative rules. There is no hidden truth to be found by the heroes, nor is there any link between cause and effect in the events. I wanted to film landscapes that had no picturesque qualities.I refuse to accept the commonly held romantic idea that nature rhymes with harmony." Lucrecia Martel
This quote above is taken from the director's statement and I've included it because this is a film that needs a qualifier like this if someone really wants to 'get' the film.
La Cienaga is directed with a distance to it. It recalls the feeling one has when they stand outside on a summer afternoon and hears thunder miles off in the distance. The film uses a quite dead pan humor in its many seemingly disconnected scenes: the middle aged adults are all drunks and the kids wait around and then slowly seem to be taking control of everything around them.
Although the film is vitually plotless it centers on two families who seem to be waiting out the boring boughouis existence of their lives. A 50-something year old mother and father spend their days out by the pool drinking wine and getting wasted. They seem apart of some kind of faded glory. Their kids play around with the neighbors and seem to always be getting into trouble.
There is a loose feel to the film as if life is happening before our eyes. If there is anything that keeps people in their seats it is that there is an ever present sense of the danger in the film not to mention an inherent eroticism between the kids that one understand if they come from a close-knit family.
Director Lucretia Martel shows a sure hand at framing scenes and setting a suspenseful pace but she isn't about to tell us how to think about the characters. This is the kind of film that you don't so much appreciate as experience and comprehend by intuition.
Matt Langdon
Director: Jacques Rivette
Art, life and soap opera all commingle in Jacques Rivette's latest opus. Rivette makes long films and, if you like his work, it's a good thing because there are few filmmakers who have the guts or the clout to make a film that lasts more than two and a half hours.
Rivette realizes that there is a fine line between the real and the artificial - especially in theatre and film and he enjoys exploring the irony and dynamic of the two. Va Savoir -- like many of his other films -- deals with the nature of reality versus the nature of theatricality or art.
This film follows a love triange of sorts between three men and three women over a few days in Paris. Camille (played by the lanky awkwardly attractive Jeanne Balibar) has come to Paris with an Italian theatre troupe led by Ugo (Sergio Castellitto) an Italian who - while in Paris - is searching for a lost play by Italian playwrite named Goldoni.
While searching he becomes interested in a young woman named Do (Helene De Fougeroles) who frequents the library. It just so happens that she has a private library that may contain the missing play in her house and she is willing to let him come and peruse the books. While there Ugo becomes closer to Do (who is much too young for him) until her possessive brother Arthur (Bruno Todeschini looking like a French version of someone in the Kennedy clan) begins to crowd the relationship.
Camille meanwhile goes to visit her very strange ex-lover Pierre (Jacques Bonaffe) and talk about old times. He is now married to a woman names Sonia who seems on the surface to be his complete opposite.
The relationships begin to unfold but nothing is what it seems. Everybody seems to be playing games with one another and tensions rise, unsettling circumstances mount and the artificiality begins to poke through the seams
To add to the many layers Rivette drops in scenes of the play by Pirandello titled "Come Tu Mi Vuoi", which vaguely parallels the narrative of the film. Although, it should be noted, that if you don't speak Italian it is a bit difficult to understand) This technique is similar to the same thing Rivette did in Celine and Julie Go Boating with two women who take a drug and enter a soap opera.
No drugs here but there is an interesting dual in the end between Ugo and Pierre who face off high in the rafters by each drinking a full bottle of vodka until someone falls. There's also a good double cross that Camille does toward Arthur - who manages to have a relationship with each of the women. After a while it's apparent that the play is more real than the life within the movie - which after all is just a movie.
- Matt Langdon