[Film] YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL (Dir. François Ozon)

Starring: Marine Vacth, Géraldine Pailhas, Frédéric Pierrot, Fantin Ravat, Charlotte Rampling, Johan Leysen, Lucas Prisor

*** SPOILER ALERT (this article contains possible spoilers)
Living a teenage double life just isn’t as simple as it used to be. The already high chances you were gonna get caught get even worse when you factor in mobile phones, public surveillance cameras and IP addresses. Isabelle (Marine Vacth) might have even gotten out of it unscathed had it not been for technology.

Then again, sometimes it’s not the best idea to take the money and run. But when you’re barely over the edge of seventeen, you’re more likely to disassociate than to think of the consequences.

Isabelle’s first disassociation happens in the summer at the beginning of Young & Beautiful (Jeune et Jolie), a film that unfolds over four seasons marked by four songs by Françoise Hardy. As she lays on the beach with a beautiful German boy (Lucas Prisor) who means nothing to her at all, she suddenly doesn’t find herself enjoying this thing she thought she wanted, that she explicitly said she wanted. A few metres away, she stands watching herself in bewildered regret.

Meanwhile back at the ranch – the beach house her family is splitting with another family of friends – her prepubescent brother Victor (Fantin Ravat) peeps on her most private moments, prods for details about what happens with her vagina and advises her makeup choices on how whorey she looks.

But how does this explain why, by the very next season, she actually is a whore? Are we supposed to believe that a disappointing first time fucking is enough to make one spiral towards sex work? She has no financial motivation for it, with a comfortable middle-class family she seems to lack no material necessities or even light luxuries. She doesn’t even treat herself to frivolous spoils with what she earns – and she does charge a high price for the privilege of her body. She saunters around her high school in jeans and a floppy green army jacket, like a French supermodel version of Lindsay Weir from Freaks & Geeks.

As her alter ego, Léa, Isabelle does her best to appear poised and cold but it’s a thin veneer that even a slightly toxic john can see through and debunk the pretense of her legality. “Why?” pleads her mother Sylvie (Géraldine Pailhas), in winter, after suddenly being confronted with the truth about her seemingly well-adjusted daughter. Everyone asks why and digs for the answers as Isabelle tries to awkwardly be a seventeen-year-old girl, which seems to be a harder role to play than Léa was.

Conditions of her secret life being revealed force Isabelle into a therapist’s office who, much to everyone’s surprise, turns out to be her strongest ally. The why is brought up again as the central question, with matters pressed towards uncovering the daddy issues Isabelle probably has but certainly won’t admit to here. It’s not as though she lacked a father figure. Her step-father, Patrick, (Frédéric Pierrot) is a truly loving and nurturing person who wants to understand Isabelle as much as the rest, albeit with his own missteps along the way. Still, there is no why.

As Isabelle becomes more vocal about her tragic rock bottom, she also watches her world balancing out, becoming more equal and supportive, and she falls into old habits. The why is here: her need for power, for control, for a self defined by her own agency and actions no matter how dangerous they are to her or hurtful to those around her.

Her final compulsive attempt for this power puts her face-to-face with the person most harmed by her prostitution (Charlotte Rampling). It is the one person who doesn’t need to ask her why. As they re-enter the scene of an awful experience they share in the most intimate and strange way, Isabelle’s need for power seems somehow lifted, and she’s given what she needed all along – forgiveness.
- RX Beckett

Young & Beautiful plays at Bíó Paradís all through February. Young & Beautiful is currently screening in Reykjavík's Bíó Paradís, ticket cost 1000ISK. Follow the cinema's goings on facebook, and peep the screening schedule here.

Jeune et Jolie Trailer from Create Advertising London on Vimeo.

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