An Easy Girl

An Easy Girl feels famil­iar. We open on a sparkling cove in Cannes, that myth­i­cal hub of French cin­e­mat­ic his­to­ry, as a woman bathes in the crys­tal waters. A quote appears, Pas­cal, which draws our thoughts to Éric Rohmer’s 1969 dis­cus­sion piece Ma nuit chez Maud in which two men use the philoso­pher to debate sex and women. Then anoth­er Rohmer film comes to mind, 1967’s La Col­lec­tion­neuse, which begins with biki­ni-clad actress Hay­dée Politoff wad­ing through the sea.

These are con­scious choic­es by direc­tor Rebec­ca Zlo­tows­ki, who uses quo­ta­tion as a means of craft­ing a whol­ly mod­ern art­work. When we see Sofia, played by mod­el Zahia Dehar who came to fame in 2009 when she per­formed under­age sex work for a French foot­baller, she bears an uncan­ny resem­blance to Brigitte Bar­dot with her sandy hair and thick winged eye­lin­er. Jean-Luc Godard like­wise cast Bar­dot in his 1963 film Le Mépris as a sym­bol for the 1960s sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion in stark con­trast to the silent era of Euro­pean cin­e­ma embod­ied by Fritz Lang, who plays a ver­sion of himself.

Godard’s atten­tion, how­ev­er, is on Bardot’s body, espe­cial­ly in a scene in which she invites her hus­band (Michel Pic­coli) to ver­bal­ly dis­sect her anato­my and iden­ti­fy the parts he likes most. Sofia repli­cates this in An Easy Girl: her hand caress­es her breasts and thighs in extreme close-up as she teas­es two men on the beach. Like Bar­dot, she knows she can use her body to get what she wants.

Where Godard’s focus remains on the sur­face, the screen­play for An Easy Girl, by Zlo­tows­ki and Ted­dy Lus­si-Mod­este, delves into psy­chol­o­gy. When Sofia and her cousin Naï­ma (Mina Farid) go to the cin­e­ma to see Pas­cal Laugier’s 2008 hor­ror Mar­tyrs, the scene shown is of a woman’s head being sliced open. An Easy Girl effec­tive­ly does the same, study­ing the men­tal process­es behind female sex­u­al­i­ty and expe­ri­ence, con­veyed through the cousins’ con­ver­sa­tions and by Naïma’s voiceover narration.

Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, it’s a film about gaz­ing – Lau­ra Mul­vey, author of the clas­sic film stud­ies text Visu­al and Oth­er Plea­sures, would have a field day – where­by mak­ing us par­ty to the male gaze shows us how empow­er­ing it can be for women. While Sofia presents as the tit­u­lar ​‘fille facile’, we are also shown the effort need­ed to main­tain that impres­sion of ease. She has a micro-man­aged beau­ty rou­tine; she eats in pri­vate rather than in front of poten­tial suit­ors; she even claims to wax her labia to keep them soft. Sofia is a self-curat­ed fetish object, stub­bing out her slim white cig­a­rettes in a clam-shaped ash­tray, the cocks she col­lects like pearls.

Zlo­tows­ki casts an enchant­i­ng spell – just as Georges Delerue’s sweep­ing score catch­es us in the trance of Bar­dot in Le Mépris, Debussy noc­turnes flow through the cin­e­mat­ic space, giv­ing it an oth­er­world­ly charm. It’s where Zlo­tows­ki departs from Rohmer’s pro­to-mum­blecore nat­u­ral­ism to cre­ate the illu­sion of styl­i­sa­tion Sofia sim­i­lar­ly teach­es Naïma.

But just like Rohmer, this is a moral tale which mocks mas­cu­line igno­rance whilst applaud­ing Sofia’s supe­ri­or­i­ty, read­ing as ret­ri­bu­tion for the way Dehar has been slan­dered in the tabloid press. An Easy Girl reads not as the male sex­u­al frus­tra­tion of the Nou­velle Vague, but as a cel­e­bra­tion of women’s sex­u­al agency.