After last week’s Blue is the Warmest Colour, which I admittedly was not the biggest fan of, this latest film from prolific French director Francois Ozon, seems a bit tame and inconsequential. Marine Vacth stars as Isabelle, who we see in the early part of the film as a 16 year old having an unsatisfactory sexual encounter with a German boy whilst on holiday. She seems to like him, but not have any real feelings for him, and that is something we will see again and again throughout the rest of the film.
Following that encounter, we move forward a few months and the now 17 year-old Isabelle is studying at college whilst also making some cash working as a prostitute. Her clients seem to consist of sad older men and her encounters are mostly in anonymous hotel rooms. After one of them dies of heart attack mid session, she flees the scene but is caught on CCTV and soon the police, and then her family, know her secret.
I’m not really sure what Ozon is trying to say with this story which appears to be little more the fantasies of a middle aged man. Vacth is fine, but it never becomes clear why she chose to become a call girl. She doesn’t need the money particularly and seems to get very little pleasure out of it. There is a scene where she sees a news report about another student who did the same thing and a flashback to an encounter with a man whilst walking home from school, but neither of those convince. Once caught, she has to go to a psychiatrist, but apart from some probing about her relationship with her father, nothing much comes of those scenes either.
After her secret is revealed there are some interesting and amusing scenes of wives not trusting their husbands to be alone with Isabelle, and of her flirting with her flustered step dad, the excellent Frederic Pierrot. However, seemingly with nowhere else to go, the film ends with a ludicrous encounter with the dead man’s wife (Charlotte Rampling). The discomfort of those scenes is only matched by some involving Isabelle and her younger brother which have distinct incestuous overtones.
Aside from Pierrot, the acting honours go to Geraldine Pailhas as Isabelle’s mother, although the plot line involving her possible affair with a family friend is another that begins but goes nowhere. There is little else to recommend this: a major disappointment from a usually talented director.