January 23rd, 2019 | Updated on July 22nd, 2022
Two sisters confront their sexual attitudes and experiences while on a family holiday.
A Ma Soeur! is a provocative and shocking drama about sibling rivalry, family discord and relationships. Elena is 15, beautiful and flirtatious. Her less confident sister, Anais, is 12, and constantly eats. On holiday, Elena meets a young Italian student who is determined to seduce her.
Anais is forced to watch in silence, conspiring with the lovers, but harbouring jealousy and similar desires. Their actions, however, have unforeseen tragic consequences for the whole family.
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Movie Reviews: “Fat Girl”
Movie Review: Woman in Revolt
The world is a shitty, gruesome place filled with shitty, gruesome people. The loss of virginity isn’t a magical, special act that happens between two people who love each other. It’s not Marissa and Ryan, Chuck and Blair, Jane and Michael. It’s often awkward, manipulative, and emotionally fraught. It’s culturally emphasized to the point where it’s impossible to engage in any sexual act naturally, without thinking of all the societal and psychological implications (especially for women).
It’s BRUTAL and realistic in a way that most other films aren’t, at least until the last three minutes.
If you’re not familiar with Catherine Breillat, I think “Fat Girl” is a good place to start. It’s probably the least controversial, most accessible of her films (but that’s really not saying much).
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Movie Review: Nashville Scene
If nothing else, Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl is a great argument starter. Beginning with her 1968 novel A Man for the Asking, a Marguerite Duras-inspired stream-of-consciousness meditation on a sexual encounter between a teenage girl and middle-aged man, the French novelist/screenwriter/director has consistently followed two preoccupations: girls’ coming of age and the near impossibility of happiness between a man and a woman. Especially in French cinema, the former is hardly a unique subject, but her work’s queasiness stems from her frequent coupling of both themes. Fat Girl takes this daring one step further, incorporating a twist into its final reel that makes viewers reconsider everything that came before it.
The opening shot of Fat Girl—chunky 12-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) staring glumly into the camera against a dark background—refers to the ending, although one can’t foresee this in advance. All we know at first is that Anaïs, her 15-year-old sister Elena (Roxane Mesquida) and their parents (Arsinée Khanjian and Romain Goupil) are taking a summer vacation from their home in the Parisian suburbs.
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Movie Review: ColeSmithey.com
In 2001, at the height of her powers, writer-director Catherine Breillat created a trenchant social study of familial and social prejudice set in the context of a wealthy French family whose unevenly matched female siblings vie for various rights of sexual passage.
Originally entitled “A Ma Soeur!” (“To My Sister”) the film’s inappropriate English title “Fat Girl” does this movie an injustice. This clear public relations attempt at inciting controversy with a derogatory term cheapens Breillat’s bold dramatic statements regarding budding female sexuality in the modern world, and feminist ideals at large.
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