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'Young & Beautiful': A Seasonal Coming-Of-Age Tale, That's So Very French

IFC Films

French director François Ozon is a master of setting messy human relations in gorgeous places.

In Under the Sand, a husband disappears at the beach. Swimming Pool takes place at a vacation home in the South of France and now Young & Beautiful tells another story of human difficulty that starts at the kind of place overlooking the Mediterranean you can’t wait to spend some time in.

François Ozon builds the film on your desire for that sweetness. Not for the house or the vacation so much as for the comforting feeling that the world is OK and people love each other. There’s a house just up a wooded hill from the water. A family and some close friends eat their meals outside in the shade. They’re good-looking; they smile and laugh and talk with one another.

It’s luxuriant in the way that lots of us would love to spend a vacation in France.

Through someone’s binoculars, you watch a young woman take off her bikini top and sunbathe. Her little brother is spying on her, but he’s curious, not pathological, and he has news for his almost 17-year-old sister Isabelle (played by 24-year-old Marine Vacth), a boy she likes is looking for her. The boy seems nice, and just as horny as Isabelle. But her first time for sex turns out unsatisfying, and it changes her from a happy kid to a sullen and distant young woman. For the rest of the movie, you pine for that idyllic summer before Isabelle and Felix make love on that beach.

Director and writer François Ozon divides the film into four seasons. In Paris in autumn, Isabelle, in straight skirt and high heels, strides through a world of glitzy office buildings, and down a corridor in an upscale hotel. She’s still in high school – Ozon shows her in a poetry class – but after school, Isabelle works as a prostitute.

After the radiant sensuality of the summer, the chilly loss of graciousness and of Isabelle’s girlhood hurts. She’s now a sex worker, and the film shows her at her part-time job. After her dull-eyed sexual adventures, she changes back into school clothes – jeans and sweaters – but you don’t think of her as a school girl any more. That’s gone.

Young & Beautiful comes from France, not the U.S., so the fundamental questions have to do with behavior not with sin. Isabelle is doing something stupid and dangerous, but when she’s found out in winter – it has to happen – her mother’s rage and despair are about the humiliations and loss of childhood that Isabelle must have endured, not about the state of her soul.

The film complicates matters. Isabelle’s last client is a regular, a married man maybe in his 70s, who’s kind and friendly. It’s nothing like a romance, but they’re slightly fond of each other. So in the midst of the mother’s reactions, therapy sessions required by the police, and the mask of innocence Isabelle wears at school, there’s a kind of wistfulness for a relationship that was commercial and perverse, but still had feeling.

Young & Beautiful is a terrific film about place and the implications of architecture. The fabulous relaxed summer house collides with the cold upscale hotel and offices, with less elegant hotels, and in turn with the look of Isabelle’s high school. Her life feels fragmented, in spite of the warmth of the family apartment which gives Isabelle privacy, a place to be in bed alone and a hiding place for her growing pile of cash.

With spring, the picture heads toward restoring Isabelle’s youth. She meets a boy her own age; she re-joins her family, but it may not last. Too much has been lost. Then, the last sequence of the movie makes a turn that’s unexpected.

Without giving away what should not be given away, one thing I can say is that this ending is completely, totally French.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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