36 FILLETTE
With Delphine Zentout, Etienne Chicot, and Jean-Pierre Leaud.
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Among coming-of-age films this acrid little gem is an ideal antidote for Porky’s-style teenage sex fantasies, and director Catherine Breillat’s 14-year-old protagonist Lili (Delphine Zentout), bubbling over with bile and braininess, makes John Hughes’s teenage heroines look about as complex as Annette Funicello in her Beach Blanket Bingo phase–no, make that her Mickey Mouse Club days. Lili is a lushly developed (in a pudgily Rubenesque way), ferociously precocious lower-middle-class girl from a Parisian suburb who is grimly determined to lose her “horrible” virginity with the first faintly intriguing male passerby–and make it snappy, si’l vous plait. Most undaintily, Lili arranges her own defloration with all the impersonal efficiency of a heat-seeking Sidewinder air-to-air missile homing in on target, which in this case takes the unlikely form of a supremely jaded 40-ish playboy. (Even the usual Freudian phallic imagery found in films about sex is inverted, even subverted, in this cunning work.) The roles of predator and prey flip-flop at every turn, confusing characters and audience alike, which is no mean feat. Director Breillat, screenwriter for Maurice Pialat’s estimably gritty Police (1985), thoroughly demolishes every trace of prurience, instead focusing on the almost dizzying conflict within Lili–her confusion over her hunger for life and her anger at it.
Lili marches off to the local disco, more sulky than sultry, clothed provocatively in a black bustier and trousers. Hitchhiking, she and her brother are scooped up by Maurice (Etienne Chicot)–an “old Romeo,” Lili declares–who is a venerable disco habitue with the equivalent of an advanced degree in misogyny. Breillat pits this keen-witted kid who doesn’t quite know what she wants against a dissipated and bitter gent who doesn’t really like what he knows he wants. In a series of sparring bouts Lili and Maurice tease and taunt, tantalize and torment one another–and the underage seductress becomes so insistent and dominant that it’s tempting to see her as a molester of middle-aged men. With close to cruel glee she tests the power latent in her sexuality, while Maurice approaches this latter-day Lolita with what amounts to a languid shrug of his shoulders, evidently having nothing better to do than dabble in a bit of statutory rape. Their physical clinches are about as erotic as wrestlers body-slamming, because what is at stake is so obviously power, not passion. At this level 36 Fillette resembles–at a cost, I think–the robustly misanthropic epics of Bertrand Blier (Menage), in which everyone cynically uses everyone else, with the pecking order sometimes changing but not the nature of the characters or the game.
