Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl is an unsettling, perceptive study of two sisters and the pressure hidden inside courtship. The young leads make it worth the discomfort, though a forced later turn weakens the film.
Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl is a sharp, distressing drama, weakened by a later turn that feels imposed on its characters. We recommend it for the performances and for its close attention to how people hurt one another while talking about affection. Breillat, who also writes the screenplay, makes the sisters’ relationship worth our attention before asking us to consider what their experiences mean. Her patience with them is what makes the film work.
Anaïs Reboux plays Anaïs Pingot with a reserve that gives us plenty to consider without settling what she thinks. Anaïs’s perspective on her sister’s seduction gives the film its particular discomfort: we are watching someone else watch, and cannot be certain what she will take from it. Reboux does not make Anaïs easy to read, and we are grateful for that. She has dignity without becoming a helpful commentator on Elena Pingot’s choices, which keeps the sisters’ complicated bond from being reduced to a lesson.
Roxane Mesquida makes Elena’s vulnerability difficult to dismiss, even when the writing gives her less complexity than her sister. Opposite Libero De Rienzo as Fernando, she has to make the desire for affection coexist with the pressure of the encounter, and the performance holds those feelings together. We were upset by the sexual negotiation because the emotional exploitation was so plain, even as it took the form of courtship. Breillat stays with the exchange long enough to prevent us from tidying it away as an unfortunate misunderstanding.
Giorgos Arvanitis’s cinematography serves this scrutiny well, keeping our attention on the people involved and the difficulty of reading them. Pascale Chavance’s editing allows the negotiation to accumulate pressure instead of hurrying towards the next event, and the deliberate pace has a purpose here. François-Renaud Labarthe’s production design is less important to the scene’s force than the performances; we are occupied with what the people want from one another. There are stretches when the slowness becomes wearing, but the central encounter needs that time to show how affection can be used to exert pressure.
The difficulty comes when Breillat changes course later on. We will not describe what happens, but the shift feels arbitrary beside the care of the earlier scenes, and it makes the director’s wish to confront us too apparent. After such close observation of the sisters, this insistence on provoking a response seems unnecessary. It also makes Elena’s narrower characterisation more troublesome: Mesquida has done enough to make us care about her as a person, and the writing should have given her the same consideration.
As a drama about sexual awakening, Fat Girl has the courage to stay with confusion and unequal power without making either easy to bear. Its 86 minutes ask for attention, and the performances reward it even when the writing becomes too insistent. We would have preferred Breillat to leave more of the thinking to us, especially after Reboux has shown how much an unreadable face can contribute. Choose it for the sisters, with company prepared for a difficult conversation afterwards.
