Fat Girl Review (Film, 2001) The Archives
Catherine Breillat is a masterful French director with a clear artistic vision. She sets out to explore the toxicity in contemporary sexual relationships, specifically the dangerous and harmful behavior of men in their pursuit of sexual conquest. Her films are often difficult to watch, but rarely escalate to the level of horror.
Fat Girl is the exception that proves the rule. Breillat presents the masterpiece of the New French Extremism in this unnerving suspense/horror about two young sisters exploring their sexuality on vacation. The older sister, Elena, is a beautiful young woman who falls head over heels for a college student, Fernando. The younger sister, Anaïs, is fat. She is considered a burden by the family and used as a literal anchor by the family. Elena is only allowed to leave the safety of the gated holiday villa if she takes Anaïs with her. Nothing will stop Elena from pursuing a sexual relationship with her first love, even her own sister literally in the room where it happens.
Breillat’s trademark is long, lingering cuts that capture every moment of awkward sexual tension. Elena and Fernando’s first time together is a half hour series of full body shots, awkwardly cut with interruptions from Anaïs’ perspective. Breillat refuses to let the audience ignore the awkward, uncomfortable, and illegal advances of Fernando. There is no loving cuts to just hands, just legs, just lips. We see everything from Anaïs’ view and cannot escape into the comfort of Hollywood romantic cliches.
The structure of Fat Girl is like the first act of a Hitchcock thriller. Imagine the opening stretch of Psycho as its own stand alone feature film. The murder of Marion Crane would be the finale of the film, cutting to the credits as the blood circles the drain. The tension would build to an unbearable level over the course of 90 minutes, leaving the audience simultaneously shocked and unfulfilled when the heinous act of violence against a woman happens.
The Psycho comparison is not an arbitrary one. The third act of Fat Girl turns the quiet, disturbing thriller in a seaside Italian town into a road suspense film. Breillat borrows liberally from Psycho and The Vanishing to foreshadow the turn to pure horror. A scene inside a rest stop looks like a shot for shot remake of The Vanishing, while the tense car ride with mother and daughters exceeds the paranoia of Marion thinking everyone is out to get her in Psycho. Even someone who might think Fat Girl is an extreme Feminist treatise on the oversexualization of young women will quickly realize Breillat meant this horrifying story to be horror.
The New French Extremism movement was a powerful shock to the filmmaking industry. Out of nowhere, all these independent French directors began weaponizing Hollywood-style blood and gore to craft satirical and critical examinations of cinema and society. Horror fans were confronted with a social awareness all too often kept in the background of the genre, while critics were forced to contend with directors of Breillat’s stature tricking them into exploring the destructive nature of narrative and cinematic tropes they praised in tamer fare.
Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl doesn’t shy away from the gore; the film just holds off until the last possible moment for the blood to flow and its brutal. The Extremism is exemplified in her treatment of romance. A touch on the cheek by Fernando is just as horrifying as the family massacre at the start of High Tension.
Breillat pushes psychological horror to new extremes by making it clear that rape by coercion–breaking down the partner’s barriers until their clear and repeated “No” is forced into a “Yes”–is rape. There is no escaping the violent nature of Elena’s infatuation with Fernando, only exceeded when the film fulfills its thesis with one of the most disturbing sequence of violence captured in all of cinema.
