A Real Young Girl
| A Real Young Girl | |
|---|---|
French Poster
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| Directed by | Catherine Breillat |
| Produced by |
Pierre Richard Muller André Génovès |
| Written by | Catherine Breillat |
| Starring |
Charlotte Alexandra Hiram Keller Rita Maiden Bruno Balp |
| Music by | Mort Shuman |
| Cinematography |
Patrick Daert Pierre Fattori |
| Edited by |
Annie Charrier Michèle Quevroy |
| Distributed by | Rézo Films |
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Release date
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Running time
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93 minutes (Uncut) |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
A Real Young Girl (French: Une vraie jeune fille) is a 1976 French drama about a 14-year-old girl's sexual awakening, written and directed by Catherine Breillat. The film, Breillat's first, was based on her fourth novel, Le Soupirail.
This film is notable for its graphic depiction of sexuality, which includes Charlotte Alexandra exposing her vulva. This led to it being banned in many countries. It was not released to theaters until 2000.
Alice Bonnard (Charlotte Alexandra), a 14-year-old girl attending a boarding school in France, comes back to her home in the Landes forest for the summer of 1963. She flashes back to her time at school, where she frequently masturbated out of boredom. Her father (Bruno Balp) hires a young man named Jim (Hiram Keller), with whom Alice immediately becomes infatuated. Alice has a graphic sexual fantasy in which Jim ties her to the ground with barbed wire, and attempts to insert an earthworm into her vagina. When the earthworm will not fit, Jim tears it into small pieces and puts them in Alice's pubic hair.
At a carnival, a middle-aged man exposes himself to her on a ride. She then arrives home and imagines seeing her father's penis. She exposes herself to Jim, and the two masturbate in front of each other, to Alice's chagrin. She discovers her father is having an affair, and Jim tries pressuring her into having sex. He is then shot and killed by a trap Alice's father set up to keep wild boar out of his maize field.
Critic Brian Price refers to A Real Young Girl a "transgressive look at the sexual awakening of an adolescent girl," an "awkward film" which "represents Breillat at her most Bataillesque, freely mingling abstract images of female genitalia, mud, and rodents into this otherwise realist account of a young girl's" coming of age. Price argues that the film's approach is in line with Linda Williams's defense of literary pornography, which Williams describes as an “elitist, avant-garde, intellectual, and philosophical pornography of imagination" versus the "mundane, crass materialism of a dominant mass culture.” Price argues that "there is no way ... to integrate this film into a commodity driven system of distribution," because it "does not offer visual pleasure, at least not one that comes without intellectual engagement, and more importantly, rigorous self-examination." As such, Breillat has insisted that "sex is the subject, not the object, of her work."
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