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Fat Girl


A Ma Soeur!


A Ma Souer! is one of those films that is better when you are thinking about it afterwards than it was at the time. It is quite difficult to rate because while I found it tedious and unpleasant almost to the point of being unwatchable, it is at the same time undeniably thought provoking.

I believe that this film is known in the US as Fat Girl, so you won’t be surprised to find that it is about a fat girl, Anais, who is a spectator to her prettier, older (but still underage) sister’s holiday romance with a smooth-talking creep. Cue enough teenage nudity to make it very uncomfortable to watch. It’s all very French (perhaps I have been watching the wrong films, but it does seem to me that an unusually high proportion of French films feature underage sex, incest or rape. Or a combination of the three).

The biggest problem with A Ma Soeur is that despite being only 82 minutes long, it is quite boring. There are lots of very long takes of nothing much happening – Anais swimming, someone eating a sandwich, the sisters watching television – which become grating. Perhaps the intention is to convey Anais’s own boredom, perhaps a drive for realism. One (uncharacteristically symbolic) scene features Anais stood on a beach next to a particularly phallic looking lighthouse while her sister and her boyfriend canoodle in the sand. Subtle. The seduction of the older sister is excruciating to watch, partly because of how uncomfortable the whole situation is, partly because of how clichéd and obvious everything he says is. I don’t know how she falls for it – has she never read a teen magazine? It is the banality of the dialogue, the look of the film and (until the ending) the events which I didn’t like.


And yet, if the film is looking to be an exploration of boredom and sexual thoughts of a teenage girl, if it is looking to disturb you and make you feel uncomfortable, it succeeds. And the characters, from the unfulfilled fat girl to the distant, chain smoking mother are believable, if not people you would want to spend much time with. It is not a badly made film in that respect.

And then, of course, there is the ending. Which is a complete departure from and yet at the same time absolutely connected to all that has gone before. It is either an extreme illustration of ‘be careful what you wish for’
WARNING: "A Ma Soeur" spoilers below
The sister wishes she would die and her mother would die and they are killed, while Anais wants to lose her virginity to a stranger and not to die, and she is raped and left alive
or a deranged fantasy. Either way, while watching this film is not a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half, it will stay with you.