Fat Girl · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A girl swims to the pool ladder and kisses it. Then she swims across and kisses the strut of the diving board. She is playing both boys in a love triangle she has invented, speaking both their parts, and she is twelve years old and alone in a hotel pool with nobody watching but us. It is the tenderest scene in Fat Girl and the bleakest. Everything the film knows is already there: desire rehearsed by a person nobody intends to rehearse it with.

Anaïs is the fat girl of the title, which is not the title Breillat gave it. She called it À ma sœur!, a dedication. The English distributor called it a taunt. The gap between those two titles is roughly the film's subject. And here is the thing to know about Anaïs: she is the only person in the movie who sees clearly, and she can do nothing at all.

Gilles Deleuze wrote two books on cinema in the early eighties, and the hinge between them is easy to state. In one kind of film a person takes in a situation and acts, and the action changes the situation. That is most of narrative cinema; Deleuze called it the movement-image. In the other kind, action stops working. Someone perceives fully and accurately and has no move available. Deleuze called that person a voyant, a seer, and thought the day cinema found her was the day it began handing you time directly instead of using time to measure movement.

Anaïs in the second bed is about as literal a seer as film has produced.

The centrepiece runs roughly twenty minutes. Fernando, an Italian law student, is in Elena's bed talking her out of her virginity: proof of love, you would be hurting me, anal sex offered as a technicality that preserves what he claims to value. Anaïs lies three feet away, awake, performing sleep. Arvanitis's camera sits at about bed height and stays there. There is no score. Breillat withholds reaction shots almost everywhere in this film and withholds them hardest here. Deleuze's name for what that produces is the pure optical and sound situation, the opsign and the sonsign: an image you can only look at and a sound you can only listen to, with no action available at the other end.

The lens earns its keep because of what it does to the accusation. Without it, the scene is an endurance test and Breillat is a provocateur. With it, those twenty minutes are the exact duration of lying awake in a room where something is being done to your sister in a language you can hear straight through. The long take stops being a style. It is blocking.

Her face does the rest. Anaïs Reboux was a non-professional, directed toward absorption rather than expression, and Deleuze had a term for that too. The qualisign is the reflecting face that holds a quality without discharging it into anything: feeling registered, never spent.

The part of Deleuze that fits this film best is the part nobody quotes, his account of naturalism. A naturalist film gives you a real, specific social setting, which he called the derived milieu, then reveals it as the thin skin over an originary world of raw appetite where the only law is a downward slope. The derived milieu of Fat Girl is the French seaside holiday: chalky Atlantic light, a hotel pool, a dinner table, the form Rohmer perfected in Pauline at the Beach eighteen years earlier. Breillat keeps the form exactly and strips out the irony that made it survivable. The originary world is a stand of trees behind a motorway rest stop. The three movements, seduction then exposure then annihilation, are the line of slope, and nothing in the first two prepares the third by the rules of psychology. It is prepared by the rules of the fairy tale, where a girl who goes into the woods meets what is in the woods.

The naturalist world has its object, and here it is the opal ring. Fernando gives it to Elena as proof, it turns out he stole it, and his mother comes to take it back while both mothers watch. That is Deleuze's fetish, the small part-object carrying the whole compulsion. The romance ends as a property dispute, which is the film's argument delivered as farce before it is delivered with an axe.

Libero De Rienzo plays Fernando so that sincerity and predation cannot be pulled apart. Deleuze calls this figure the forger: not someone who lies and not someone who tells the truth, but someone who manufactures truth as he goes. The whole night is a transaction conducted in a language of love that both parties know is false and neither can afford to name.

The rest area is an any-space-whatever, a space that has stopped functioning as the setting for anyone's action. It belongs to nobody, which is why it was chosen. The car is a lit box on a black road with trucks strobing past. Then glass breaks, the first genuinely loud sound in the film, and the axe arrives with no build, no music, no threat established. The killer comes from what Deleuze called the absolute out-of-field: not an offscreen space next door, but an outside the film's realist system never accounted for. Then the rape is elided into a hard cut. That is the interstice, the irrational cut, two shots joined across a gap you have to think your way over rather than see. Whatever you conclude about the ending, notice that Breillat denies the audience the one thing an exploitation film would have sold it.

She had been building this for twenty-five years. The seduction unit came from 36 fillette (1988): girl, older man, hotel room, scene-length written dialogue in which the bargaining is the drama and the sex is a footnote. The framing grammar for Anaïs, plain static setups with no erotic lighting, the body presented as physiological fact, comes from her suppressed first feature Une vraie jeune fille (1976). The non-professional child directed toward blankness, the diegetic-only sound and the catastrophe that refuses to be earned are Bresson's, out of Mouchette. Letting a family scene run past comfort until violence erupts inside the same unbroken take is Pialat's, learned firsthand while she was writing Police for him; the mother's slap at the roadside comes off his table. The flat, brief, unemphasized murder of a young woman after an hour of unremarkable life is Chabrol's structure in Les Bonnes Femmes.

The invention is the second bed. 36 fillette already had the room and the talk. Fat Girl adds a witness, and that one addition moves the point of view off the body being negotiated over and onto the person who has to listen. This is what made coercion filmable as a process rather than an event, and it is small and permanent: during a sex scene, cinema's camera had always been on the bodies. Breillat put it in the next bed. From there the girls who came after are visible everywhere, unlovely and watchful and hungry and holding the film's intelligence, in Hadžihalilović's Innocence, Sciamma's Naissance des pieuvres, Arnold's Fish Tank, Hittman's It Felt Like Love, Ducournau's Grave. The long, unbroken, deliberately uncomfortable consent scene is now near-standard equipment in art cinema, usually uncredited.

Then the last line. Anaïs walks out of the trees under police escort and tells the officers not to believe her if they don't want to. Deleuze's word for a character who takes over the telling of her own story is fabulation, the storytelling function passing from the film to the person inside it. A twelve-year-old claims authority over what has just been done to her, in advance, before anyone can take it from her. Whether that is a rescue or the argument's last turn of the screw, the film will not say.

Watch it again for two things. Where the camera is during the seduction: bed height, in the other bed, not moving. And Anaïs's face, which never once tells you what to feel. The film hands you the seeing and keeps the verdict.