Jeune et Jolie | Little White Lies

Jeune et Jolie

29 Nov 2013 / Released: 29 Nov 2013

A young woman with long dark hair resting on a white sheet, gazing intently at the camera.
A young woman with long dark hair resting on a white sheet, gazing intently at the camera.
3

Anticipation.

Always worth seeing if François Ozon’s got a great film in him...

2

Enjoyment.

...even though he very rarely does.

2

In Retrospect.

An open text, though one that doesn’t add up to much whichever way you chose to look at it.

A glassy-eyed and ambigu­ous por­trait of a teenage call-girl from direc­tor François Ozon.

It would come as no sur­prise if French direc­tor François Ozon, one day in the future, made a tru­ly great film. But that time has yet to come. Sure, he’s made a fair few decent films, maybe even the odd real­ly good one, but nev­er a work which might lodge him firm­ly into the hal­lowed annuls of con­tem­po­rary film lore. And so it is with his lat­est, Jeune et Jolie, a film so care­ful and so self-con­scious­ly unwill­ing to reveal its hand, that you spend much of its run­time think­ing that it might just be a one big ol’ bluff at the view­ers’ expense.

Isabelle is young, sex­u­al­ly curi­ous teenag­er (played with Sphinx-like pas­siv­i­ty by the lis­som Marine Vacth) who could pret­ty much have any man she laid her glassy eyes on. She duti­ful­ly off-loads her vir­gin­i­ty dur­ing a mid-night cavort­ing ses­sion on a quaint fam­i­ly beach hol­i­day, though the impres­sion we’re giv­en is that the expe­ri­ence was not a par­tic­u­lar­ly sat­is­fy­ing or mem­o­rable one. Yet, it has in some way altered her per­cep­tion of the world, as well as the per­cep­tion of her body and its poten­tial appli­ca­tion. Though monied, suc­cess­ful and aching­ly mid­dle class in every respect, Isabelle decides that the thing she needs to do right now is to become a call girl.

Ini­tial­ly, the film fol­lows her as she learns the par­tic­u­lars of her clan­des­tine trade, learn­ing the right ways and wrong ways of doing sex­u­al busi­ness via sim­ple tri­al and error. But it soon becomes clear that Ozon has set his sights a lit­tle high­er and that his film is con­stant­ly teas­ing the view­er towards adopt­ing a moral stance on the appar­ent­ly motive­less actions his implaca­ble hero­ine while nev­er impart­ing quite enough infor­ma­tion to allow us to amply do so. Vacth, who has all the emo­tion­al clar­i­ty of a par­tic­u­lar­ly blank Bres­son­ian mod­el’, just car­ries out her illic­it duties with­out ever reveal­ing what her rea­sons might be.

It’s a risky strat­e­gy, and one which doesn’t pay off. Even though Jeune et Jolie is a film about teenage lib­er­a­tion and self-reliance, its opaque mes­sage ends up com­ing across as a Reefer Mad­ness-style con­ser­v­a­tive broad­side about the wor­ry­ing habits of habit­u­al­ly immoral teenagers. There is a conun­drum hid­den with­in the core of the text which relates to the essen­tial­ly unknow­able nature of human beings and the sug­ges­tion that, some­times, peo­ple just do things for rea­sons that oth­er peo­ple will nev­er be able to under­stand, and that in itself is an inter­est­ing con­cept. But when fil­tered into a dra­ma such as this, it trans­lates as a noth­ing more than an intel­lec­tu­al Get Out Of Jail Free card.

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