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Special Features
- New digital transfer with restored image and sound plus new subtitle translation
- Behind the scenes footage
- Two interviews with the director including a look at the alternate ending
- Trailers
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Fat Girl is a typically shocking, utterly discomfiting provocation from director Catherine Breillat, whose excursions into female psychology and movie sexuality are anything but clinical. (See 36 Fillette and Romance for further proof.) Two adolescent sisters journey to the seaside on vacation with their parents; the younger sister is overweight and brooding, the older girl a beauty who attracts the attention of a smooth-talking boy. Much of the film is built around two painstaking seduction scenes, characteristically shot by Breillat with both comic and horrific overtones and long, uncomfortable takes. The final section then tips into an outright descent into hell--you can never let your guard down with Breillat. So complicated were the seduction scenes that Breillat subsequently made a feature about the shooting of them, Sex Is Comedy. Fat Girl was released under an alternate title, A ma soeur!, but Fat Girl, in English, is Breillat's original and preferred title. --Robert Horton
Product Description
Twelve-year old Anaïs is fat. Her older sister, Eléna, is a teenage beauty. While on vacation with her parents, Anaïs tags along behind Eléna, exploring the dreary seaside town. Eléna meets Fernando, an Italian law student, who seduces her with promises of love, as the ever-watchful Anaïs bears witness to the corruption of her sister’s innocence. Precise and uncompromising, Fat Girl (À Ma soeur!) is a bold dissection of sibling rivalry and female adolescent sexuality from one of contemporary cinema’s most controversial directors.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
98 of 103 people found the following review helpful
It upsets me that reviewers have focused on the issues of weight and female competition and jealousy that do exist in this film, but completely ignore the major point of this film. Breillat gives us a brutally honest portrayal of female "baptism" into sexuality. It is not pretty, or romantic, or even sensual (as the socially astute "fat girl" realizes). The older sister, whose bed is surrounded by issues of Cosmo, appropriately enough) is hyper-feminized, and believes that she needs to look as if she stepped off the pages of Cosmo to get and keep and please a man--the most important tasks a woman is given by our culture. Her younger sister is less accepting of these--in fact she repeatedly says that she wants to lose her virginity to someone she doesn't love (a fact consistenly ignored by reviewers in their reviews, and vital to understanding the ending and the distinction between the two sisters). The shocking ending is so significant in this regard--Breillat dares us to question the nature of female adolescent sexual experiences, and to blur the line between consensual and nonconsensual sex in the context of female adolescent sexual awakening. I believe that the consistent overemphasis on weight, (note the strange translation of A Ma Soeur to Fat Girl???) which certainly is an important underpinning of all that transpires in the film, is to the detriment of fostering open discussion of the issue of sexuality; I can only assume that this stems from an inability on the part of the public to get past the reality that adolescent females are in fact sexually active, do not have adequate and reliable resources and information to deal with newfound feelings and cultural expectations and norms, and face often traumatic circumstances as a result.
91 of 111 people found the following review helpful
When I first heard that the English title of Catherine Breillat's 'A ma soeur' (literally 'for my sister') was 'Fat Girl', I was shocked that such sexism and sizism could exist in such strangulatingly p.c. times, especially in the light of the director's uncompromising, though idiosyncratic feminism. But from the very first sequence, Anais' weight is foregrounded, as she devours a banana split at a cafe while her sister is being chatted up by an Italian student. The body is the focus of this film, its display, and the attempts to control it, whether by deciding how much you're going to eat, by seducing minors or by deciding to whom you'll offer your virginity. Like another recent French film, Patrice Chereau's 'Intimacy', Breillat focuses on sexuality in a way hostile to mainstream cinema. Unlike 'Intimacy', whose gauche attempts at realism destroyed its credibility, Breillat insists on formality and artifice, from the summer holiday setting, with its two heroines 'locked up' in a chalet that, with its guards, gates, bars, curfews seems like a high security prison; to the ritualistic manner in which characters negotiate sex; to Breillat's awesomely complicated filming apparatus. The film's coup-de-theatre is a lengthy scene in which Elena sneaks in her boyfriend to the bedroom she shares with a sister she assumes is asleep. Not only is the viewer faced with the problematics of staring at the naked, fetishised body of a minor, and the increasingly grotesque and hypocritical attempts of her lover to seduce her; not only is the framing unflinchingly static, with the odd, sinisterly creeping movement, and the tight compositions forcing the two lovers into an airless claustrophobia; but our voyeurism is shared by our knowledge of the mostly unseen gaze of the younger girl looking on. Though this is the longest and most rigorous example, the film is full of scenes like this, triangular groupings of characters inflicting or evading each others' surveillance, while the parents who have theoretically imposed a rigid discipline on the girls see nothing. Spatial relations draw attention to themselves, as do the symbolic resonances of the settings (chopped woods, dunes etc.). The filming is deliberately unshowy, often flat. Narrative proceeds by a looping pattern, the same characters shifting positions in similarly-set scenes.
So rarefied and artificial is this milieu, that when reminders of the outside world intrude, such as financial worries, it is shocking. And this is where the film becomes especially brilliant. What seemed to have been a fascinating dramatisation of ideas culled from feminism and film theory, focusing on ideas of free will, choice, exploitation, truth, knowledge, appetite etc., the extraordinary last third reminds us that we don't always have a final say in everything we do. The mix of suspense and surprise, and the play on doubles, mirrors, sleeping and fairy tale motifs, is masterly.
24 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
Anaïs is a plumb, unattractive 12-year-old girl who lives in a dream world, not unlike many girls her age, where one day she'll find true love, marry and live happily ever after. Her sister Elena is a beautiful 15 year old who has become very aware of her sexuality. For the most part, their self-obsessive mother and workaholic father are uninvolved in their lives and they are pretty much on their own. During a family vacation, which dad must abandon because of work, the girls meet a good looking Italian law student, Fernando, and Elena, literally reeking with wanton sexuality, arranges to meet the young man at their vacation house. Since Elena shares a room with Anaïs, the younger sister is sworn to secrecy. After Fernando arrives, we learn very quickly that he's been around and his objective is solely to score with this young girl, but confronted with the reality of sex, Elena is hesitant. She wants more than sex . . . perhaps she even shares her younger sisters illusions about love. Nevertheless, Fernando convinces her that she can please him sexually and it won't really count as sex. This scene along with the actual act the following night are difficult to watch, but more so for Anaïs. Besides the anger, jealousy and disillusionment, all of her notions of romantic love are being warped. Her dreams have disappeared and she's become numb. When the shocking violent end arrives, we should hardly be surprised by her reaction. Graphic and powerful stuff by controversial director Catherine Breillat.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Awful, perverted movie. Very disturbing.
I don't know why anyone would rave about this movie. Basically it is about a teen girl (15 yr old) and a tween (12 yr old) girl being sexually abused/raped by various men. Read more
Published 17 days ago by Currer Bell
WTF
This movie was good, interesting, until the end where it became very strange and made absolutely no sense. All I have to say is be prepared so say WTF, as I did.
Published 6 months ago by Q. Fulton
A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
A MA SOEUR concerns, perhaps, the fertilizing intervention of the stranger, the intrusion of strangeness into the familiar. Read more
A MA SOEUR concerns, perhaps, the fertilizing intervention of the stranger, the intrusion of strangeness into the familiar. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Joseph Suglia
French Cuisine
A dark and moody story about two pretty sisters, one of the thin variety and the other of the chubby variety, who go through various phases of emotional trauma. Read more
Published on January 28, 2010 by EnergyWork
Novel and noteworthy
The Bottom Line:
The film which convinced me that Catherine Breillat could spin her considerable insight into sexual politics into an incisive and engaging film, Fat... Read more
The film which convinced me that Catherine Breillat could spin her considerable insight into sexual politics into an incisive and engaging film, Fat... Read more
Published on July 23, 2009 by One-Line Film Reviews
So many movies in one!
So originally you seem to be presented with another coming of age movie. It moves on to explore other themes such as sibling rivalry and sexuality. The movie is beautiful to watch. Read more
Published on July 22, 2009 by Jessica B. Klauke
Not sure I understand why it's so controversial...
Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001)
So I've now finally seen a Catherine Breillat film. And it's been a month, and I'm still not exactly sure how I feel about it. Read more
So I've now finally seen a Catherine Breillat film. And it's been a month, and I'm still not exactly sure how I feel about it. Read more
Published on October 10, 2008 by Robert P. Beveridge
Save your money and time Read This ... !
WARNING !!!
SPOILER ALERT
Save yourself an hour and a half of garbage ... Read This.
So the film drags along for over and hour. Read more
SPOILER ALERT
Save yourself an hour and a half of garbage ... Read This.
So the film drags along for over and hour. Read more
Published on July 28, 2008 by sweet-one
sneaking in the porn...
Relevant, but shocking subject matter, plus out of the blue "What the heck..." ending. This film, almost 8 years old is undoubtedly innovative, which I appreciate. Read more
Published on May 9, 2008 by Robert Barrera
One of the better films of this genre
Title was probably not the best in the world but the film is certainly not as bad as the title may suggest. Read more
Published on February 22, 2008 by Gogol
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