I watched this about 5 years ago and was quietly enamoured. But now I’ve watched it again and am less enamoured.
A brief film (80 minutes) about a brief ferry crossing from La Havre to Portsmouth. A young French kid has a one night stand with a older English woman.
Or maybe its her that is having the one night stand with him. She’s indulging herself in a dalliance, a bit of kinky naughtiness (paedophilia I think you’d call it) He’s only 16. She’s old enough to be his mother.
She orders roast beef and chips from the menu but doesn’t want the chips. Er, munching through some sad solitary roast beef without any Yorkshire pudding, without any gravy or vegetable? Odd.
And she’s oddly staring at this French lad munching through his chips.
Odd and somehow sadly estranged as if she doesn’t quite know what she’s meant to make of this kid or what she’s supposed to be doing with him. She’s eyeing and sizing him up with cool appraisal, which makes him feel self consciously uncomfortable (and almost choke on his chips)
Blimey, he’s young looking isn’t he? A fresh faced callow sap of a sop. Decidedly very wet behind both ears.
Anyway, she seems to have decided she’s going to make use of him. To get things off her chest. Quasi- philisophical musings-cum-moanings about how disillusioned she feels
‘Life is endless and boring’ she says. ‘I don’t do anything’.
And she sounds pretty fed up and cynical about men and relationships too.
“Men put you in a box and you go into it just like a goose cos you think there’s nothing more beautiful than love.”
Its mostly her leading the conversation with these moany monologues; and he follows after her like a little puppy dog with his silent tongue hanging out.
You wonder whether she’s going to give him what he wants. A piece of her pussy. She might, but will have to tease and frustrate him in order to firm up the fickleness of his desire. She’s at pains to disillusion him
‘I’ll never fall in love with someone who can’t hurt me’
And of course, being this wet behind the ears nice kid he hasn’t got the power or the prestige or the personality to hurt her, make her suffer. Which, according to her cynical way of thinking, rules him out in the old falling in love stakes.
She’s the one in control of how far this seduction scenario will go. He’s her little puppet (or puppy) on a string. But she’s feeling sorry for leading the poor lad on. Or maybe she’s too bored to continue the silly game on any longer. So she lets him have his clumsy way with her.
‘The best way to make love to a girl is with a slow rhythm, gently quivering inside’ she coaches as he blindly clambers and clatters away ontop of her.
She’s deflowered the poor little prick of his precious petals. It didn’t seem like much pleasure was derived from that, for her, or for him. No matter. It’s got her through the night, it passed the time away.
And yet the next morning, before disembarking, she looks at him, not with the glazed estrangement with which she first stared at him (stuffing down her chips) but with something that looks softly like affection, perhaps even gratitude.
Has he been the means through which she’s divested herself of some of her sour disillusion and encrusted disenchantment perhaps?
The denouement at the end defies credibility a bit. She’s being met by her husband (the husband she’d claimed she’d separated from) and is scooping up her little daughter into her loving mothering arms.
Poor Thomas. He sees this closing scene with tears in his eyes. The disillusion about relationships, the disenchantment about love, that has been hers, she’s now passed on and given to him.
This film is definitely seen from the POV of a woman. Alice acting as Catherine Breillat’s philosophic mouthpiece and erotic embodiment. Sarah Pratt does a commendable job of balancing conflicting emotions and capricious motives. Gilles Guillian as the French kid looks suitably pretty for the role, but also a bit too suitably vacuous.
I thought I’d be wanting to keep this film for regular re-viewing. But it doesn’t warrant any further investment of my time or attention. The delete button awaits.
Dir: Catherine Breillat, France
On first watch this was getting 7.5/10; but now its been relegated to a barely passable 6/10
Windows on the World 