Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/17/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

A Real Young Girl (Catherine Breilliat, 1976)

Charlotte Alexandra and Hiram Keller in A Real Young Girl

Cast: Charlotte Alexandra, Hiram Keller, Rita Maiden, Bruno Balp, Georges Guéret, Shirley Stoler. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, based on her novel. Cinematography: Pierre Fattori, Patrick Godaert. Production design: Catherine Breillat. Film editing: Annie Charier, Michele Queyroy. Music: Mort Shuman.

Catherine Breillat's first feature, A Real Young Girl, was made in 1976 but not released until 2000. Like the rest of her oeuvre, it's about female sexuality, in this case the sometimes perverse desires and fantasies of a 14-year-old girl, Alice Bonnard, played by the 20-year-old Charlotte Alexandra. Alice is home from school at her parents' farm and sawmill in the French countryside, and she doesn't have much to do other than indulge those fantasies. Many of them center on a handsome young man known as Jim (Hiram Keller), who works for her father at the sawmill. She hates her icy mother (Rita Maiden) but is a little too playful for comfort (ours) with her father (Bruno Balp). Alice's fantasies spill over into reality as the film goes on, and sometimes it's hard to tell which is which. It's a raw and unsettling film, just painful and messy enough to pull it this side of pornographic, with some narrative clichés that Breillat would outgrow, like naming her heroine Alice and resorting to a Chekhov's gun for what passes as climax in the slender plot. But it's undeniably the work of a uniquely skilled filmmaker.