Fat Girl debuted at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival, and was scheduled for release here shortly afterward, but the Ontario Film Review Board had other ideas, deciding the film was unacceptable unless cuts were made to scenes that show a teenaged girl and her older boyfriend having sex. Director Catherine Breillat refused, and the film was banned in Ontario. Over a year later (and with a different chairman of the OFRB), the decision was reversed, and the film can finally be seen on the big screen.
Fat Girl (titled Á Ma Soeur! in French) focuses on the relationship between two sisters: the younger, overweight sister of the title, Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), and pretty 15-year-old Elena (Roxane Mesquida). Although Elena has fantasies about losing her virginity to a boy she loves, her idealism is not much in evidence when she latches onto law student Fernando (Libero de Rienzo) in one of the most efficient pick-up scenes I’ve ever seen, and apparently entirely at random. She ends up losing her virginity to him as Anaïs looks on, which she can’t really help doing—the rendezvous takes place in the bedroom the two girls share. But this is no Larry Clark-style gratuitous depiction of teen sex. Like the rest of the film, the scene is carefully crafted and wound tight.
The performances are uniformly strong, especially those of the two sisters (Reboux makes her screen debut here). Breillat also uses colour to great effect, as a symbolic vocabulary that underlines the similarities and differences among the sisters and their emotionally distant mother (Arsinée Khanjian). In some scenes the two sisters are aligned; in others, the mother and one sister. At times the characters seem to become shifting blocks of colour—exercises in form—who at the same time never lose their integrity as characters.
Neither sister has a satisfactory postion in the economy of patriarchy as presented by Breillat. Anaïs has to suffer the ignominy of sitting alongside older, conventionally beautiful Elena, as well as being constantly abused about her weight. Even apparent kindnesses toward her often have darker undertones. In a scene as disturbing as any in the film, when Anaïs is upset, Elena holds her close and almost force-feeds her. “Eat,” she says. “It will make you feel better. It takes you mind off what’s in your head.” Elena gets most of her power, if you can call it that, from the way she looks, and especially from the direct comparisons made between her and her sister. It’s in her interest that Anaïs stay the weight she is.
For her part, Anaïs is on her way to believing that because of her appearance, romance will never be hers, although she struggles valiantly against the idea. There is a tremendous scene in a pool in which she swims back and forth between the diving board post and the ladder, talking to and kissing each in turn, pretending each is her lover.
Thin and beautiful Elena gets the real-life romance, but in many ways it’s just as devoid of humanity. Fernando’s seduction is an agonizing example of manipulation; he is alternately loving and cajoling, then cold and distant, until he gets what he wants. In a tour de force of sleazebag behaviour, he eventually succeeds with the argument that anal sex “doesn’t really count” as losing your virginity. And anyway, if she won’t do it he’ll just have to go somewhere else. He’s a guy, after all. Sex is merely something she should do for him—it’s all about his needs and hers have no relevance for anyone, least of all Elena herself.
Along with their mother, both sisters jostle for what power they can get, which in the end, it seems, is none at all. It’s a bleak outlook, in a film that is ultimately about varieties of violence—a point driven home in the shocking but shatteringly perfect denouement.
