Fat Girl: Breillat’s Authentic “Piece of Shit”

• 
• 

Few films deserve the grand appellation “piece of shit,” and I am perhaps even more recalcitrant than other filmgoers to throw that kind of judgment around loosely; after all, I do not subscribe, as many do these days, to the almost default critical persona that assumes a condescending superior distance to any work of art being reviewed simply because you, the critic, has not had the audacity, and well, frankly, untoward self-defined perspicacity, to actually create something (John Simon and his ilk are in my mind, like dogs who lick their own privates); on the contrary, I feel the more appropriate critical positioning is one of humility, an acknowledgment that someone has worked feverishly or spent years of their life to attempt to deliver something to you meaningful, or entertain you, or make you angry or uncomfortable, or make you feel turned on; so when I use this phrase it contains not merely a dismissal but a real and deep engagement with the quality of “shittiness” imbued in what I am watching. I think it was Roger Ebert who noted in a review that as he walked out of Caligula, Bob Guccione’s magnum opus scatologicus (which cost something like $14 to see in 1980, adding to its, um, “stature”), that a deflated woman exiting the movie next to him exclaimed with great and memorable discouragement about the future of humanity, “what a piece of shit.” Other films that come to mind along these lines are Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, precisely because it aspired to such wonderful, ambitious things and couldn’t quite launch anything cohesive in the end; or Showgirls, whose screenwriter, one of the highest paid and worst in history, aspired to such depths of purposeful scuzz that he gave birth to a classic not quite of unwitting camp but more the victory of cynical, renumerative schlockmeistering over any attempt at a logical or plausible evaluation, sexy or vital or funny or surreal or otherwise etc., of humanity itself; in other words, yes, true “pieces of shit” must rise to the level of twisting the basic demands and functions of art into some hybrid between inspiration and commercial pressure (be it external or internal)… some unfortunate beast born of a conjugal visit between the creative impulse on the one hand and the assembly of a numbly manufactured product for the damned and dull on the other. And so it is with these instances in mind that I announce Catherine Breillat’s shocker Fat Girl as one of the greatest shitpiles in recent memory.

If it were indeed physical feces, it would not be of the relatively fresh, innocent, lightly smelling variety pushed out by your average infant; it would be the lingering, fermenting turd of an dirty old man living in a back alley of Paris who has been reading, and literally eating the pages from books by Camus and Sartre and Camille Paglia: for this is pretension, French pretension, at its most inept and banal and weary. If you are going to shock me, then do it: make me sick to my stomach and heart; but just do it thoughtfully, with a mastery of the ramifications of shock. Do it like Gaspar Noe, another provocateur of French language film – with skill, mystery, imagination, and risk. But don’t do it like a cruel, errant schoolboy who doesn’t understand the effects of a badly concieved prank he has just foisted on the class, without any grasp of the responsibility that accompanies and annunciates shock and makes it powerful in the first place, and who creates effects and consequences that spiral away from him, as he watches helplessly.
Imagine you are sitting in a bar and your typical college Frat Dude is telling you about a film he’d like to make; excitedly, he tells you the basic story is this: there is this really hot and beautiful teenage girl, see, who’s not particulary likable or interesting, but is awakening to her budding sexuality and having an affair with a college guy vacationing near her family’s summer home (he’s no prize conversationalist either, by the way); problem is, she’s got this younger sister, who is harmlessly chubby in the way many twelve year old girls are before they enter adolescence, and she’s not so likable or interesting either, maybe a bit more interesting because once in a while she sings French songs wistfully to herself, but not that much—and while hot sis is trying to get it on with college guy in her bedroom late at night, her younger sibling is in the same room, tossing and turning and grumbling because she has the nerve to think she shouldn’t just bear it while these two moan and fumble and speak in long rambling dialogues that are supposed to skirt the line between ponderous and profound, or more accuratley plumb the depths of ponderousness for its profundity, but just wind up being badly written; anyhoo, this problematic situation goes on for awhile, and along the way we also realize mom and dad too alienate chubby sis and resent her because she’s not hot sis, and everyone generally treats her miserably in a vacant way, and then hot sis and chubby younger sis and their mother drive around for awhile, with lots of tension and portentous atmosphere thrown in, until at the very end, at a gas station on the highway, a crazy maniac rapist jumps on the hood of their car out of nowhere, clubs hot sis to death, kills mom, and then drags chubby sis into the woods and rapes her on the ground. The thing is…well here’s the clincher, the Frat Dude tells you, kind of leering and leaning forward, obviously aroused by his own cleverness…the end of the story is really bizarre and provocative because this rape verges on being portrayed as having a rustic kind of sensuality and tenderness, and afterwards, once the rapist has fled and left chubby sis alive, there’s a strange look and almost-smile on her face because even though she’s a twelve-year-old who’s just been violently raped by a stranger, the event turned out to be a kind of esoteric, European-like rite of passage that breaks the smothering grip of evil mean hot sis and mom on her life, and all the envy and emptiness we have witness is distilled into and given catharsis by a transgressive and ugly but ultimately transformative trauma, which signals a kind of dark coming-of-age and ushering into womanhood and self-discovery, because finally someone wants to bed her and she is the center of attention, which every child longs to be…even though the flattery icomes from a serial-killer type at the local fill-up station. In summary, the closing sequence is a blurring of stark reality and dream-like fantasy wish fulfillment all at once…and should keep people whispering argumentatively over their cocktails for many a year to come…
Now, Frat Dude adds, all of this is gonna be thrown at you without any backdrop of developed, intriguing characters containing dimension, which might, by some stroke of GOD, allow the perverse, climactic reverse deus-ex-machina closer to have some combination of horror and pathos and grotesque vulnerability in it; no, it will come after one and half hours of meandering, pompous screenwriting that gives ennui a bad name and during which we do not build the necessary empathy for, connection with, or insight into Fat Girl, so that just in case she does get assaulted by a violent rapist serial killer out of nowhere at a gas station, her honest, frustrated, confused, and dangerous ambivalence might be truly provocative.

Well….whaddya think? Frat Dude finally asks you, obviously satisfied with himself, and the only thing you can think of is to report him to a mental health clinic, the prominent feminist group on campus, a screenwriting seminar, and the local authorities. Now… to paraphrase Matthew McConaghy at the end of the trial in A Time To Kill… pretend that instead of it being a Frat Dude who was regaling you at the bar….pretend you are at a chic café and the person who just told you this story is a well-known female “vanguard” French filmmaker, a supposed daring provocateur. Now open your eyes. In my mind, it wouldn’t make much of a difference: either way, hearing this story pitch or seeing the film made from it, you would want to righteously tell the narrator to go fuck himself.

Posted by Lights! Editorial Staff on Feb 23 2010 Filed under Our Feature Presentation, Pu Pu Platter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry