A Real Young Girl

Rating:
Summary: Quite disturbing and replusing film
Review: Probably one of the worst films I've ever seen. Not that it was absolutely awful, it's just that it was actually quite disgusting. The sexual parts are not so disturbing as are the symbolic parts (i.e., chicken heads being sliced off, etc.) The film is reminiscent of the French New Wave, perhaps it even was classified as such. Then again, I have never see a New Wave film as repulsive. All-in-all, not a film for the light-hearted. Also, the title "A Real Young Girl" doesn't really have bearing on the main girl character. The girl in the movie actually looks like she's in her 20's.

Rating:
Summary: Very Realstic
Review: This film has to be the most realistic film I've seen on teenage sexuality. It's truthfully shocking like Larry Clark's "Kids". The main character, "Alice" played by Charlotte Alexandra has a very edgy look which gives the film an intense feel. This film is sexually explicit, but the scenes are relevant and realistic. As always the ending will catch you off guard as in any Catherine Breillat film.

Rating:
Summary: A FEMALE DIRECTOR WHO LET'S IT ALL HANG OUT.
Review: THIS MOVIE IS NOT FOR EVERYONE,BUT IT DOES HAVE IT'S MOMENTS. MUCH IN THE VEIN OF FATGIRL(SAME DIRECTOR).

Rating:
Summary: A Real Young Girl
Review: `It is not realism I want, it is reality understood through symbols'-Breillat


The films of Catherine Breillat are attempts to overthrow the state of cinema, they are intimate, contradictory films, films that test the limits of censorship, and then break them. `A Real Young Girl' is Breillat's descent into the hell of confusion, it's a surrealist tragedy shot in neo-realism, it speaks with the language of the `fist cinema' that Godard spoke of when describing the films of the godfather auteur of symbolism and social commentary sold as cheap exploitation, Sam Fuller. Breillat captures life in its most anti-climatic, most seemingly meaningless moments, and records them, with the violence and intensity of the fluttering, fleeting souls that she makes films about. The film is a kind of post-apocalyptic fairy tale bordering on complete psychedelic ecstasy and yet painted by feelings and scenes of extreme-realism, indeed, Breillat's heroine is named Alice (certainly a reference to `Alice In Wonderland') and she is at once innocent and decadent (like the film itself). She stumbles in and out of washed out reality, finding shelter in her own confusion, the film is structure-less and poetically-coherent, trifled with aimlessness and wielding emotions insanely, cinema as a real young girl. When Breillat's heroine is seen standing in front of a mirror, slowly disrobing, and we hear her electrifyingly confessional voice over: `I like to take myself apart, piece by piece' it is a scene of such violent emotion that we back away from it, Breillat uses sexuality as a test of our emotions, like Bertolucci in `Last Tango In Paris' she explains her characters using only the cold mechanics of sex. But if Breillat has created a new kind of cinema, something that speaks with emotions, something poetic and dangerous and intimate, something at once structure-less and direct, something at once surrealistic and realistic, it is most certainly because of her anti-conformity, her desire to terrorize the bourgeois state of most movies and her willingness to shock (although always remaining anachronistic): Breillat is too anarchic an artist to fall into the mechanics of shocking, her attacks remain fresh and pure and alive. Film should be an attack, always alive and never remote, and Breillat has inspired the most interesting new film artists in Europe and America (Asia Argento, Gaspar Noe, Bertrand Bonello and Larry Clark) to militate and spread this idea, coincidentally they have all tested the limits of pornography and experimented with it to make it more meaningful, more emotional, less coldly constructed. This is the new revolutionary cinema: the political and sociological study of sexuality deconstructed, once these militants of this new art form will have overthrown censorship from the inside, the bourgeois idea of segregation in the cinema (`moral' cinema versus anything that contradicts it) will have been demolished. `A Real Young Girl' was Breillat's first film and it shows, it is stylistically naive and has that feeling of purity that is ever-present in the first works of great, original film-artists. More than a film it is unconsciously a declaration of the war that Breillat would continue to fight, the first speech of a great revolutionary, the first moment of a long-lasting battle, one that has not yet won, and is not meant to be won, but only proven.