MOVIE REVIEW : ’36 Fillette’ Fills Bill for Coming-of-Age

“36 Fillette” (Westside Pavilion) rings so true that to watch it is like eavesdropping on life. French director Catherine Breillat’s film of her own novel is so fresh and incisive, so poignant yet funny, that its coming-of-age story unfolds as if it were the first of its kind.

In a sense it is, for it’s impossible to recall a film that more thoroughly illuminates what it is like for a girl to become a woman sexually. (There are plenty of fine films telling of boys’ sexual rites of passage.) What’s more, the clear-eyed Breillat does this with as much detachment as compassion--and without a trace of coyness or sentimentality. Few films are more breathtakingly honest about sexuality, male as well as female.

Fourteen-year-old Lili (Delphine Zentout) is vacationing in Biarritz with her family. This is not the fabled Biarritz of elegant hotels and nightclubs but of camping out on the beach in a trailer with her self-absorbed, perfectly ordinary parents (Jean-Francois Stevenin, Adrienne Bonnet). Lili is bored to death but at last succeeds in persuading her sweet-tempered elder brother (Stephane Moquet) to get their father to let her go into town with him one evening.

Lili is off and running in her tight black pants and camisole. She may still wear a girl’s dress size-- 36 fillette --but she is voluptuous beyond her years. She yearns to test her sexual allure and easily attracts Maurice (Etienne Chicot), a 40ish businessman. A classic roue with a self-proclaimed ruthlessness toward the women he so easily seduces, Maurice is not conventionally handsome but is trim and virile with thinning blond hair. He is not at all prepared for the rush of emotion he feels for the solemn but tantalizing Lili.

What makes “36 Fillette” so special is the way Breillat and Zentout express with subtlety and comprehensiveness the conflicting feelings that beset Lili. She is not simply eager to lose her virginity, and she is not merely a flirt. She doesn’t want to lose the power that she has just discovered she wields over men, which submitting to Maurice represents to her.

She wants to become a woman without losing her heart--just as surely as she is eager to overthrow the conventional morality, which she finds is more of an inhibiting force than she had realized.

“36 Fillette” brings to mind Joyce Chopra’s equally impressive yet very different film of Joyce Carol Oates’ “Smooth Talk.” In that film, Laura Dern’s American teen-ager possesses a naivete that seems light years away from the reflective, assertive Lili even though both are virgins (and Dern is in fact older). The two films offer a striking contrast between French and American attitudes toward sex.

For that matter, “36 Fillette” is unimaginable as an American film: Almost certainly it would be “dirty” since it has a 14-year-old heroine.

Indeed, it is that special French gift for taking emotions seriously while treating sex realistically that allows “36 Fillette” to be erotic and sensual yet also discreet and non-exploitative. Instead of judging her people, Breillat attempts to reflect the psychology of human emotions in the telling of what is in essence an autobiographical story.

With only two films behind her--and they were 10 and 15 years ago--and the script for Maurice Pialat’s “Police” to her credit, Breillat has a style so natural, so spontaneous, that it eludes description; she calls attention to her people rather than to herself.

Breillat has said that “36 Fillette” (Times-rated Mature) was a tough, scrappy film to make, but she has been well-compensated with the complexity and rawness of emotion Zentout and Chicot bring to Lili and Maurice. Others are equally admirable, especially Jean-Pierre Leaud, who has one long and memorable scene as a celebrated musician who takes the time, after his concert, to have a conversation with Lili. You are left feeling that he is the first person to speak to her as an adult--as a man to a woman.

Also on the bill is Horst Schier’s delightful 3 1/2-minute “Sole Mani,” in which a single human hand, aided by makeup, plays all the members of a symphony orchestra.

‘36 FILLETTE’

A Circle release of a co-production of CB Films in association with Sofica Cofimage and National Center of Cinematography. Producers Emmanuel Schlumberger, Valerie Seydoux. Director Catherine Breillat. Screenplay Breillat, Roger Salloch. Camera Laurent Dailland. Film editor Yann Dedet. With Delphine Zentout, Etienne Chicot, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Olivier Parniere, Berta Dominguez D., Jean-Francois Stevenin, Diane Bellego, Stephane Moquet, Adrienne Bonnet. In French, with English subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.