36 Fillette (1988, Catherine Breillat)

I generally find Catherine Breillat to be something of a hit & miss director, more so because so many of her films end up becoming merely didactic with limited style to show for it. Even the weightiness of the shock value of her works can be wearisome & transparent at times. During those times when she doesn't have discourse on the brain & is dealing with matters of the heart, she hits her stride.

36 Fillette is something of the awkward middle child of an unofficial trilogy of films about adolescent girls & their burgeoning sexuality. Also, the film is rather tame by Breillat standards in terms of sexual explicitness, which makes it a less effective film than her previous A Real Young Girl, a work that was borderline surreal in exploring the protagonist's sexual experimentation, or Fat Girl probably among the most unnervingly memorable marriage of sex & violence & yet struck me as one of Breillat's least heavy-handed works. Mind you, I do not view sexual explicitness & frankness as inherent virtues of effectiveness in exploring sexuality as a theme as suggestion is capable much of the time of being even more effective. With that said, in the case of Breillat a lot more direct honesty & baggage comes along with presenting explicit (or "confrontational") material. 36 Fillette is more concerned with the psychological over the physical aspects of sexuality & its relation to gender dyamics. The manner in which Lili's sexual ambivalence plays out particularly in the long scenes with her & the creepily predatorial & simultaneously ambivalent in his own right, Maurice, is both greatly uncomfortable & yet there's something of a humanistic heft & it's hard not to feel a certain degree of compassion for her.

Inevitably however, 36 Fillette also lingers in the shadow of Maurice Pialat's truly wonderful A nos amours, another film that deals with adolescent sexuality, but only as part of a much larger framework of emotional upheaval & confusion heavily shadowed by the broken familial unit. Even though there's a significant difference in how the girls of these two films express their sexuality, & what they hope to obtain from it (Suzanne of A nos amours primarily seeks emotional kinship as opposed to immature Lili's need for independence & a sense of mature selfhood), it's hard not to feel that quite a good bit of Breillat's film feels like well-tread territory. These factors do play out as well to lesser depth & effect in 36 Fillette, but yet the way the influence of the upset family unit is executed by Breillat, it feels forced, & somewhat bogs down her film.

Slow Motion (1980, Jean-Luc Godard) aka Every Man for Himself

Prostitution is certainly a key theme among much of Godard's work in its relationship to capitalism. First seen in Vivre sa vie, & more directly related to consumerism in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Godard's recycling of such themes always produces a different different yet very Godardian & there's something of a clear arc of cinematic approaches, ideas & concerns running through his work.

Prostitution isn't an exclusive theme of Slow Motion, but it is a partially dominant one in how it looks at social power/sexual relations (moving away from exploring its relation to capital), which end up playing out in often scathingly funny ways, particularly during some lengthy & ironically desexualized role-playing. It's also worth noting that this was something of a "comeback" for Godard being that he grew far less prolific after the fallout of what went down in 1968. The film hints more at the serious side of Godard (despite the fact that I think this in particular is very humourous as well) which would unfortunately become a dominant tone of his later work. That is not to say that his earlier work wasn't serious in what it had to say or that its concerns weren't serious, but there's a playful & often giddy visceralness to much of that work that stands in contrast to the cranky stuffiness of something like In Praise of Love, but I digress. What marks the more serious strands of Slow Motion is its concern with film itself (i.e. the other dominant theme of the film) especially w/r/t reinvention & the function of film as largely expressed by a Godard surrogate naturally also sharing his last name (I generally roll my eyes at such overt self-reference, but yet I didn't mind at all here) as played by the always great Mr. Francoise Hardy himself, Jacques Dutronc. Elsewhere the film's use of slow motion (thus its apt UK title) in relation to narrative & altering time & motion becomes an effectively engaging mode for exploration of ideas as opposed to the tiresome visual gimmickery we so often see in film nowadays.