YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL/ Jeune et Jolie

West Coast Premiere • Drama • France, 2013

DCP • 1.85 • Dolby SRD • Color • 95 min

 

Directed by: François Ozon

Written by: François Ozon

Cinematography: Pascal Marti

Film Editing: Laure Gardette

Original Score: Philippe Rombi

Produced by: Nicolas Altmayer, Éric Altmayer (Mandarin Cinéma)

Coproduced by: France 2 Cinéma, Mars Films, Foz

Cast: Marine Vacth (Isabelle), Géraldine Pailhas (Sylvie), Frédéric Pierrot (Patrick), Fantin Ravat (Victor), Johan Leysen (Georges), Charlotte Rampling (Alice)

International Sales: Wild Bunch

U.S. Distributor: Sundance Selects • ifcfilms.com

U.S. Release: April 25, 2014

 

In his most complex and mature film to date, filmmaker François Ozon pulls the carpet out from under a coming-of-age tale to reveal an unsettling reverie on sexual awakening, 21^st century-style. The first of four chapters begins with summer on the French Riviera: Isabelle, an arrestingly beautiful sixteen-year-old, is determined to lose her virginity, but when she succeeds, the experience leaves her cold and detached. Cut to the second chapter: autumn in Paris, and Isabelle is now leading a double life as a prostitute with her own website for setting up after-school assignations with a motley line-up of johns. But this secretive, latter-day Lolita is no victim. Well adjusted and well-off, it appears that she is simply enjoying her value as a commodity in the sexual marketplace. Whatever her motivations, with winter and spring yet to come, we can expect anything – anything that is, but easy answers. As the inscrutable Isabelle, Marine Vacth finds the sweet spot between steely nerve and reckless vulnerability in a star-making turn.

 

Once the bad boy of French cinema, writer/director François Ozon is now a respected, mature filmmaker, without the provocations and stylizations that marked his earlier films. With this, his fourteenth feature, Ozon’s work shines with new depth and subtlety, even if his tried and true themes of voyeurism and precocious adolescent sexuality remain front and center. Ozon established a reputation for those themes with his first feature, Sitcom (1998), about a pet lab rat with the peculiar effect of loosening its adoptive family’s sexual inhibitions. His earlier work was often wildly inventive, as with the stagey, pastiche comedy, 8 Women (2002), co-written with Marina de Van. In 2003 he gained a wider audience with the hit English language thriller, Swimming Pool, co-written with Emmanuèle Bernheim. Last year, Ozon showed a more disturbing, visceral side with his voyeuristic adaptation In The House (COLCOA 2013). With Young and Beautiful, he continues in that direction.

 

 “Young and Beautiful is Ozon's most restrained and ambiguous film to date, one that is crafted with such elegance and fluidity that it is easy to miss the deeper truths that lie beneath the placid surface.”

- James Travers FILMSDEFRANCE

 

“Both psychologically probing and unerringly elegant in its nonjudgmental restraint, driven by a transfixing performance from the incandescent Marine Vacth.”

- David Rooney HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

 

“But it’s Vacth who really owns the film, some feat considering her character is so elusive, slippery as smoke, and yet more than just a cipher for screwed-up kids today.”

- Leslie Felperin VARIETY