36 Fillette (Catherine Breillat, 1988)

Delphine Zentout in 36 Fillette

Cast: Delphine Zentout, Etienne Chicot, Olivier Parnière, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Berta Dominguez D., Jean-François Stévenin, Diane Bellego, Adrienne Bonnet. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, Roger Salloch, based on a novel by Breillat. Cinematography: Laurent Dailland. Production design: Olivier Paultre. Film editing: Yann Dedet. Music: Maxime Schmitt. 

Catherine Breillat's explorations of adolescent female sexuality continue in 36 Fillette. (The title refers to a French dress size in the "Junior" range.) The protagonist, Lili (Delphine Zentout), is 14 years old and precocious both mentally and physically, but perhaps not emotionally. She's visiting Biarritz with her mother (Adrienne Bonnet) and father (Jean-François Stévenin) and her 17-year-old brother, Bertrand, (Olivier Parnière). One evening, she wheedles her self-absorbed parents into letting her accompany her brother on a nighttime excursion into the clubs at Biarritz, and they hitch a ride with a 40-something businessman named Maurice (Etienne Chicot), who has a couple of Bertrand's acquaintances in his car. Eventually, Lili and Bertrand go their separate ways, and in the course of her explorations Lili encounters a local celebrity, Boris Golovine -- an extended cameo by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who got his start in movies playing a disaffected adolescent in The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959). They strike up a conversation which provides the bulk of exposition for Lili's character. Then she re-connects with Bertrand and Etienne, and goes off with the latter for an evening of sexual and emotional exploration in which it becomes apparent that Lili is in many ways the more mature person of the two -- though perhaps not enough to justify such an exploitative relationship. In the French manner, the film is too talkative to be shocking, but Breillat is really not out to shock audiences so much as make them question their own reactions to such a pairing. Zentout, who was 16 at the time, gives an astonishing performance, though I find myself queasy at the thought of so young an actress playing such a role.  

The Face Behind the Mask (Robert Florey, 1941)

Evelyn Keyes and Peter Lorre in The Face Behind the Mask

Cast: Peter Lorre, Evelyn Keyes, Don Beddoe, George E. Stone, John Tyrrell, Cy Shindell, Stanley Brown, James Seay, Warren Ashe, Charles C. Wilson, George McKay. Screenplay: Allen Vincent, Paul Jarrico, Arthur Levinson, based on a radio play by Thomas Edward O'Connell. Cinematography: Franz Planer. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Sidney Cutner. 

A real sleeper, Robert Florey's The Face Behind the Mask performed poorly at the box office and was critically dismissed on its release, but over time it has gained admirers. Florey and cinematographer Franz Planer do what they can with the movie's scrawny budget, achieving some haunting expressionistic images and telling the story with great economy: The film runs only 69 minutes. It's a showcase for Peter Lorre, who plays Janos Szabo, a Hungarian immigrant to the United States whose naïve enthusiasm is smothered when he's horribly scarred in a fire. (We get only a brief glimpse of his scarred face, but it's enough to make what follows plausible.) Trained as a watchmaker and skilled with his hands, Janos is unable to find work. Then a chance encounter with a small-time thief (George E. Stone) sets him on the road to crime. Trying to earn money for plastic surgery, he becomes the head of a small ring of jewel thieves, using his expertise to break into safes and circumvent burglar alarms. (It's a sign of the small budget, and of Florey's narrative economy, that we never see him and his gang at work.) They make enough for Janos to have a rather creepy mask made to cover his disfigurement, but on learning that surgery can never fully repair his face he becomes despondent. Then he meets a blind woman (Evelyn Keyes) who doesn't care what he looks like, and they fall in love. It's a rather soppy twist to the story, and Keyes is never able to make her character other than a saccharine cliché, but the film takes a darker turn that undercuts the sentimentality. Lorre is terrific throughout, as Janos ranges from meek to menacing to heroic. 

Nowhere (Gregg Araki, 1997)

James Duval in Nowhere

Cast: James Duval, Rachel True, Nathan Bexton, Chiara Mastroianni, Debi Mazar, Kathleen Robertson, Joshua Gibran Mayweather, Jordan Ladd, Christina Applegate, Sarah Lassez, Guillermo Diaz, Jeremy Jordan, Alan Boyce, Jaason Simmons, Ryan Philippe, Heather Graham, Scott Caan, Thyme Lewis, Mena Suvari, Beverly D'Angelo, Charlotte Rae, Denise Richards, Teresa Hill, Kevin Light, Traci Lords, Shannen Doherty, Rose McGowan, John Ritter, Christopher Knight, Eve Plumb, Lauren Tewes, David Leisure. Screenplay: Gregg Araki. Cinematography: Arturo Smith. Production design: Patti Podesta. Film editing: Gregg Araki. 

I have taken the liberty of listing more cast members than usual just because Nowhere is a crowded movie, a throng of newcomers, future stars, familiar faces, and a few one-shots. It's a mess, but an intentional one, the chaotic culminating film of Gregg Araki's Teenage Apocalypse trilogy that began with Totally F***ed Up in 1993 and continued with The Doom Generation in 1995. Araki called it "Beverly Hills 90210 on acid," and that serves as well as anything to describe this freewheeling farrago of sex and drugs, as Araki puts a lot of Gen Xers and Millennials through hell. It's eye-bombing and ear-assaulting, and it contains a rape scene as well as a murder committed with a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup. In short, don't watch it unprepared.