Teenage girl from a good family decides to become a hooker is the premise of YOUNG & BEAUTIFUL, a thought-provoking film from Francois Ozon, director of Swimming Pool, 5×2 and 8 Women).
The key word here is decides: no one forces her to, she doesn’t need the money (she squirrels it all away), there’s no obvious trauma in her life. So, as the audience endures Isabelle’s succession of soulless transactional couplings, the obvious question is why.
The film opens in the south of France at the height of summer when the girl’s family are enjoying their vacation: lazy days at the beach followed by long boozy al fresco dinners complete with a naughty joint for the oldies. One evening, the winsome Isabelle (Marine Vacth), fluctuating between endearing and sullen, sneaks off to the beach to lose her virginity with holiday romancer Felix while mother and stepfather enjoy a crafty smoke with friends.
In a hint at what’s to unfold, while Isabelle tarts herself up before her appointment, kid brother Victor (Fantin Rivat) teases that her lipstick makes her look a whore. The evening after, the family celebrate her seventeenth birthday and then the holiday’s over: the family voitureis packed up and it’s back to the Paris apartment. Summer is finished and autumn is about to begin (Ozon divides YOUNG & BEAUTIFUL into the four seasons).
For Isabelle, autumn is what’s known as a good little earner. Much in demand as “Lea” – both her working name and her grandmother’s name – her regular is the gentile Georges, old enough to be her grandfather.
All good things must come to an end however, and Lea’s career as a working girl ends in abrupt and tragic circumstances.
The police are called, Mum (Geraldine Pailhas) finds out and – not surprisingly – there’s much shouting and anger. When the stepfather (Frédéric Pierrot, recently seen on Australian TV screens in The Returned in which he plays the father of another troubled teen, Camille) offers Isabelle some comfort through worldly though politically incorrect words of wisdom, Mum flies off the handle again. A shrink is called in and finally we start to get some understanding of why Isabelle made her unwise career choice, although the reasons are never fully made clear.
The next season, winter, offers hope that the worst is over and, when spring begins, it appears that romance, if not love itself, is in the air.
There’s a twist at the end of YOUNG & BEAUTIFUL – heightened by a cameo role from Charlotte Rampling – that will leave audiences even more perplexed by what they have seen yet even more appreciative of the subtleties of French filmmaking.
Vacth is thoroughly believable as the coltish Isabelle, leaving the audience as perplexed as her parents by creating a sense of unapproachable remoteness. Pierrot as Dad shows more humanity than most other characters in this at times harsh and brittle film and in the process adds much-needed texture. Pailhas is thoroughly believable as a mother who struggles to hold onto her love for a hooker daughter.
In American hands, the subject matter of YOUNG & BEAUTIFUL would have been either mawkish or moralistic. Thankfully, Ozon instead takes us on a thought-provoking journey through what would be a nightmare for any family and even finds space to lighten the mood with occasional flashes of humour, – the opening spring scenes in the Paris apartment are especially delightful.
YOUNG & BEAUTIFUL opened today and is rated R18+ with high-impact sex scenes.