Classic Corner: A Real Young Girl

Completed in 1976 but unreleased until the year 2000 due to its explicit content, A Real Young Girl, the notorious and oft-banned debut of writer-director Catherine Breillat, is gross, shocking and undeniably the work of a major artist, even when it feels like a work in progress. This fragmented, expressionistic coming-of-age tale is full of elements that would fuel the filmmaker’s later masterpieces 36 Fillette and Fat Girl. All three films depict a young woman’s pubescence as a horned-up horrorshow of errant desires and bodily betrayals. Disruptive attractions and inexplicable allures have been hallmarks of the director’s work from A Real Young Girl all the way up through this past year’s phenomenal Last Summer—Breillat’s PornHub stepmom fantasy for the #MeToo era that turns into a chilling comedy about keeping up appearances.

A Real Young Girl zooms in on the sexual explorations of Alice, a 14-year-old boarding school student spending a lazy, languorous summer at home with her parents in a sleepy little seaside town. Styled to look like Alice in Wonderland—the character’s name can’t possibly be an accident— she’s played by the then-22-year-old Charlotte Alexandra, whose baby face and bodily abandon would go on to serve her well in softcore hits such as Goodbye Emmanuelle. Indeed, there’s a knowingly porny, ‘70s Euro-sploitation vibe to this film’s story and setting, with young Alice becoming fixated on a strapping himbo (Hiram Keller) who works in her father’s saw mill.

We think we know the setup for one of these “summer that changed my life” flings. Except this is a Catherine Breillat film, so one of the more alarming interludes involves the himbo cutting up worms and leaving the pieces in Alice’s pubic hair. This real young girl walks around a lot with her panties at her ankles, inserting objects like spoons and seltzer bottles into her vagina whenever the opportunity arises. A long scene is spent watching Alice play with her earwax, the character in a constant state of fascination and befuddlement at the strange secretions and sensations of her unruly body. “Disgust makes me lucid,” she writes in her diary, while examining a puddle of her own vomit.

It’s an extremely lucid film in that regard—which is to say disgusting—but not unproductively, nor entirely in the prurient interest. One can see why A Real Young Girl originally failed to find distribution, as it’s too dirty for most art film audiences and too off-putting for the skin flick crowds. This is a frank and commendably difficult evocation of a hormonal fugue state. Breillat freely drifts between reality and whatever happens to be rattling around inside Alice’s head, so that a flirty conversation with her father—a portly grotesque played by Bruno Balp—is punctuated by a shot of his tumescent penis sticking out of his trousers. From there, Breillat cuts to a chicken being beheaded and disemboweled.

The old man is having an affair, and A Real Young Girl falters in presenting Alice’s parents as cartoonish creatures. Rita Maiden plays the mother as a shrieking harpy with hair and makeup out of a drag show. The movie is too thin and underpopulated for them to be so broad, a tonal miscalculation Breillat would correct in later films. The picture’s abruptly violent wish-fulfillment ending feels like a dry run for Fat Girl, and in that way a first feature can sometimes seem like a swirling, unrefined mix of a director’s career obsessions and pet themes, A Real Young Girl feels like the Who’s That Knocking at My Door? to Fat Girl’s Mean Streets.

It’s a seriously sticky movie. Breillat’s camera lingers on the flypaper that hangs in the family’s country house, with plenty of closeups on viscous bodily fluids and icky foodstuffs. It also sticks in the viewer’s mind. Alice’s dead-eyed stare and the camera’s blunt, unsparing gaze make A Real Young Girl sometimes seem like a torture porn version of Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? Breillat revisits the traumas of puberty so vividly, she reminds you it really is a miracle anybody survives such a state. 

“A Real Young Girl” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.

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