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.