Jeune et jolie by François Ozon

Abstract

l’époque rejeté par une partie de la critique française à cause de son réalisateur danois, Carl Dreyer—ce livre devrait se trouver dans toutes les bibliothèques universitaires. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin Ozon, François, réal. Jeune et jolie. Int. Marine Vacth, Géraldine Pailhas, Frédéric Pierrot. Mandarin, 2013. Six months after the release of Dans la maison, Ozon again trains his lens on adolescent sexuality. In Dans la maison, the theme provided the occasion for drawing attention to the artifice of storytelling and filmmaking. In Jeune et jolie, it inspires a work of poetic composition, underscored by its billing as“le portrait d’une jeune fille de 17 ans en 4 saisons et 4 chansons” (all Françoise Hardy hits) and a scene in which students at the Lycée Henri-IV analyze Rimbaud’s four-part poem “Roman,” better known as “On n’est pas sérieux quand on a dix-sept ans.” Jeune et jolie tells the story of Isabelle (played by captivating newcomer Marina Vacth) who, in part one of the film, loses her virginity while on summer vacation with her loving, well-to-do Parisian family (which includes a little brother who makes his big sister promise to share the details of her first sexual experience with him). In part two, as high school classes resume, Isabelle is working as a prostitute. She keeps her family in the dark by meeting clients in hotel rooms only on weekdays and during the day, but when a much older client (of whom she has grown fond) dies of heart failure while having sex with her, police investigators bring Isabelle’s secret life to her mother’s awareness. Her heartbroken mother (Géraldine Pailhas) and more “understanding” stepfather (Frédéric Pierrot) see to it that Isabelle gets therapy, but, as happens in numerous Ozon films, her presence now unsettles family order in disturbing and slyly comical ways. Nevertheless , therapy seems to have worked its magic, and by the end of part three, we see Isabelle at a party, dancing with kids her own age and starting a relationship with Alex, one of her classmates.With part four, it is springtime and household order appears to be restored: the family, now including Alex, is seated around the breakfast table happily discussing plans for the next summer vacation.Only moments later,Isabelle announces to Alex that she is breaking up with him, and in an ensuing scene, she is consulting her hidden cell phone for messages from clients. Among those messages is one from her dead client’s wife (played by Ozon favorite Charlotte Rampling) requesting a meeting with Isabelle. Together they go back to the hotel room where her husband died; she asks Isabelle to lie on the bed beside her. When Isabelle awakens, she is alone, wearing a smile that is as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s. Some critics and viewers complain that the film does not make sense because Isabelle has no“good”reason (i.e., lack of money, family dysfunction, mental illness) for becoming a prostitute. Perhaps they missed the scenes in which Isabelle is clearly in it for her own sexual pleasure. In Jeune et jolie, 200 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 Reviews 201 Ozon dares to take adolescent sexuality seriously, and more important perhaps, he manages to portray his runway model-turned-actress more as the subject of her own desire than the object of someone else’s. Union College (NY) Michelle Chilcoat Silverman, Max. Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film. New York: Berghahn, 2013. ISBN 978-0-85745-8834 . Pp. 216. $90. What do François Emmanuel’s La question humaine, Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire, and Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge have in common? Quite simply this: each superimposes events in the narrative present onto one or more traumatic events of France’s recent past, namely World War II and decolonization, or, more specifically, the Shoah and the Algerian war. They also happen to provide an ideal introduction to Max Silverman’s insightful study into the workings of memory as it appears in...