The Fast-Tracked Unreality of Fat Girl

When I first saw Fat Girl, at the time of its release, I liked it, but I remember thinking that the sexuality in it was so distant from what I had experienced in my own life, and I was angry that the pretty girl ends up being controlled by this man. I couldn’t accept that both of the sisters, in their own way, become victims of sex. I was closer to the age of the characters then and I was judging the film from a much more moralistic perspective, but today I see it differently. I love the crazy openness of this film, the freedom Breillat gives herself to address things you wouldn’t normally talk about. 

Now that there are more women filmmakers out there, it’s easier to see the contrasts between them, rather than just being glad that they even exist. Where before I would have been happy to see anything by Breillat or Jane Campion, both of whom I like, now I can say that I feel a deeper kinship with one over the other. I can see more clearly the connection I have with Breillat. From Fat Girl onward, she moved into a very artificial style of filmmaking—you can see it in a movie like Anatomy of Hell—and the further I advance in my own work, the more I think I understand what she’s doing. Artificiality is at the heart of my new film, Little Joe, which asks: can we ever be sure that people are who we think they are? In psychoanalysis there’s a concept called the Capgras syndrome, in which a person starts to believe that someone he or she knows well has been kidnapped and replaced by an imposter. I think in some ways this is a part of our daily lives. You even feel it in this scene in Fat Girl; there’s a sense that none of us is operating according to any true feeling or free will or intention. 

I rewatched the movie recently, and I started thinking about how this scene sets up everything that comes after. Later on, there are moments where we aren’t sure if what we’re seeing is actually happening. You think the character is going to wake up and it’s all going to have been a dream, but she doesn’t. That is especially true in the brutal assault at the end, which, like the kissing in that early scene, happens so abruptly and without explanation. It’s astonishing. It’s so rare and unusual for a film to completely turn your perception of reality upside down, to the point that you would believe a dream as much as reality—because reality itself is like a dream. This is precisely what interests me in cinema. I don’t need to see what I’ve seen a hundred times before. This scene brings us to a level of surrealism that feels revolutionary to me.