A Real Young Girl<\/em> 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\u2014the character\u2019s name can\u2019t possibly be an accident\u2014 she\u2019s 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<\/em>. Indeed, there\u2019s a knowingly porny, \u201870s Euro-sploitation vibe to this film\u2019s story and setting, with young Alice becoming fixated on a strapping himbo (Hiram Keller) who works in her father\u2019s saw mill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We think we know the setup for one of these \u201csummer that changed my life\u201d 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\u2019s 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. \u201cDisgust makes me lucid,\u201d she writes in her diary, while examining a puddle of her own vomit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s an extremely lucid film in that regard\u2014which is to say disgusting\u2014but not unproductively, nor entirely in the prurient interest. One can see why A Real Young Girl<\/em> originally failed to find distribution, as it\u2019s 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\u2019s head, so that a flirty conversation with her father\u2014a portly grotesque played by Bruno Balp\u2014is punctuated by a shot of his tumescent penis sticking out of his trousers. From there, Breillat cuts to a chicken being beheaded and disemboweled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The old man is having an affair, and A Real Young Girl<\/em> falters in presenting Alice\u2019s 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\u2019s abruptly violent wish-fulfillment ending feels like a dry run for Fat Girl<\/em>, and in that way a first feature can sometimes seem like a swirling, unrefined mix of a director\u2019s career obsessions and pet themes, A Real Young Girl<\/em> feels like the Who\u2019s That Knocking at My Door?<\/em> to Fat Girl<\/em>\u2019s Mean Streets<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s a seriously sticky movie. Breillat\u2019s camera lingers on the flypaper that hangs in the family\u2019s country house, with plenty of closeups on viscous bodily fluids and icky foodstuffs. It also sticks in the viewer\u2019s mind. Alice\u2019s dead-eyed stare and the camera\u2019s blunt, unsparing gaze make A Real Young Girl<\/em> sometimes seem like a torture porn version of Are You There God, It\u2019s Me Margaret?<\/em> Breillat revisits the traumas of puberty so vividly, she reminds you it really is a miracle anybody survives such a state.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n “A Real Young Girl” is streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/real-young-girl1-1024x576.jpg\")
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