Jeune & jolie (2013)
Directed by François Ozon

Film Review

One of the most telling signs of the male menopause is a susceptibility to scopophilia, a compulsive need to spy on others (usually those endowed with youth and beauty) for sexual gratification.  Now comfortably into middle age, French director François Ozon may or may not be suffering from the male menopause but his latest films have taken an increasingly voyeuristic turn, the vicarious fantasy-weaving of Dans la maison (2012) giving way to a male fantasy of a far more lurid and carnal kind in Jeune & jolie, his fourteenth full-length film.  This time, the object of Ozon's salacious eye is a stunningly beautiful 17-year-old girl, whose repeated deflowering in front of the camera becomes so coldly mechanical that any erotic impact is soon eradicated.  What starts out as something resembling a classic coming-of-age drama soon develops into something far more disturbing, a considered meditation on the mystique of human sexuality that sheds an interesting new light on Ozon's oeuvre, in particular his early work.

In his early years as a filmmaker François Ozon was considered an enfant terrible, his darkly comical studies involving transgression of middleclass codes being provocative both in what they said and in how they said it.  Now a mature, widely respected filmmaker, Ozon has lost his capacity to shock and provokes his audience in more subtle ways, employing a less stylised approach to filmmaking as he tackles themes of an increasingly complex nature.  Jeune & jolie is Ozon's most restrained and ambiguous film to date, one that is crafted with such elegance and fluidity that it is easy to miss the deeper truths that lie beneath the placid surface.  How today's adolescents are perceived and judged by their elders is certainly one of the film's main themes, the central irony being that those who now sit in judgement were, in their youth, no better or worse than those they now judge.  However, its main theme is surely the elusive mystique of sexuality, personified by Ozon as a 17-year-old prostitute who remains as stubbornly opaque and mysterious as the French security services at the time of the Algerian War.

In her first leading role Marine Vacth (first revealed in Cédric Klapisch's Ma part du gâteau, 2011) instantly monopolises our attention as the enigmatic teenager Isabelle (to the detriment of the excellent supporting cast Ozon gathers around her, including a sumptuous Charlotte Rampling).  A starkly idealised representation of adolescent beauty, Vacth's character has a presence that is at once alluring and unsettling.  She is far too aware of the power that her nascent sexuality has over others, and yet she still exhibits the tender fragility of a little girl gazing in awe at the adult world.  In both his writing and his direction, Ozon never allows us to get too close to Isabelle, and so she remains a fiendishly insoluble paradox, and we never understand why she behaves in the way she does.  Like Catherine Deneuve's equally idealised character in Buñuel's Belle de jour (1967), her motives for becoming a prostitute appear perverse and completely unfathomable.  Needing neither money nor sexual gratification, she appears to be guided by some unseen hand, perhaps the same hand that guides the bee to the flower and forces it to steal its precious nectar.
 
Each of the four segments into which the film is neatly divided (each representing a season of one year) is accompanied by a song by Françoise Hardy.  This is not the first time Ozon has used Hardy's music - it featured prominently in Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes (2000) and 8 femmes (2002) - and it shows an uncanny synergy with his work, highlighting that melancholic sense of yearning or loss that is so much a part of Ozon's film auteur makeup.  Ozon creates with his images pretty much what Hardy does with her unmistakable voice, a need for something unattainable and inexpressible.  Jeune & jolie conveys this impression more potently that in any of the director's previous films, and leaves you moved and troubled, in a way that is impossible to put into words.

Film Synopsis

One summer, Isabelle, 16, is on holiday with her family on the French Riviera.  Encouraged by her hedonistic parents, she allows an attractive young man to rob her of her virginity, but she takes no pleasure in the experience and sees no real significance in it.  The following autumn, Isabelle, now 17, is a fully fledged Parisian prostitute, although naturally she keeps this fact from her parents.  Between leaving school and returning to her comfortable middleclass home, she arranges to meet up with her clients at various hotels, clients she has no difficulty attracting over the internet.  Isabelle has no need of the money and appears to be an intelligent, well-adjusted teenager.  Yet the life of the prostitute appeals to her, although she has yet to discover why...