Jeune & Jolie [Young & Beautiful] **** (2013, Marine Vacth, Géraldine Pailhas, Frédéric Pierrot, Johan Leysen, Fantin Ravat, Lucas Prisor, Charlotte Rampling) – Movie Review

François Ozon focuses his cameras on Marine Vacth, who gives a mesmeric performance as Isabelle, a beautiful teenage French girl, who’s bored on a family holiday in the south of France, and can’t be bothered with Felix (Lucas Prisor), the handsome German boy she gives her virginity to. Later in Paris, with summer gone, she becomes a Belle de Jour-style prostitute, selling her body to rich older men, lying about her age, and of course hiding her secret from her mother, step-father, younger brother and friends.

Ozon likes actors. Géraldine Pailhas is remarkable as the uncomprehending mother, Frédéric Pierrot is good as the cannier step-father, Fantin Ravat makes a strong impression as the younger brother, Johan Leysen is smooth as Isabelle’s kindly, grandfatherly client Georges and, as you’d maybe expect, Charlotte Rampling has a notable cameo at the end of the story. In some ways, it all leads to her.

With all the deeply etched lines on his rather handsome face, Leysen looks scarily old next to Vacth. So too, I’m afraid, does Rampling. But then everybody does. I guess that’s the point.

Ozon likes films. This one plays like a vintage Hollywood thriller, complete with old-style camerawork and score. It’s got a bit of Vertigo and some of Marnie about it, though most people will be thinking of Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. However, Ozon doesn’t copy, he uses these classics as inspiration and just takes it from there and creates his own thing from that.

His own thing is an impressive one. It’s extremely sexy and voyeuristic. He teasingly offers no explanations for Isabelle’s need to become a high-class hooker at 17. We just go with it like she does. She’s hooked, obsessed, like other people are with internet porn.

Vacth is the main weapon in Ozon’s armoury. The camera loves her, her face changes dramatically with the light. One minute she’s young, then suddenly she looks mature; one minute she looks vulnerable, the next steely; one minute she looks serious, then she’s smirkingly, mysteriously playful, Mona Lisa-like; one minute she’s charged up, the next she’s melancholic and sad. It’s a brilliant performance, at least as realised by Ozon. You want to fathom her out, like her family try to, but you just can’t. She’s an alluring puzzle without a solution.

Full marks to Ozon’s script and direction too. You can quarrel with some of the decisions but it’s easy to go with the flow. For instance, it’s a bit clumsy (not to say unnecessary) to have inter-titles marking the change of the seasons, but I didn’t mind that this time, and I enjoyed the rather pretentiously French sequence of Isabelle and her classmates reciting a poem of Rimbeau. It just works here. In another film it wouldn’t.

The film keeps you alert and unsettled. You don’t know where it’s going. There’s plenty of drama, plenty of tension, plenty of family fireworks and plenty of sex. That’s what it’s about. And there are a couple of big jolts. Ozon and Vacth keep you alive. This is exciting cinema.

Vacth is actually 23, by the way, and she should have a brilliant career ahead of her.

François Ozon is also the maker of Swimming Pool (2003) and The New Girlfriend [Une nouvelle amie] (2014).

© Derek Winnert 2013 derekwinnert.com