In Catherine Breillat’s debut feature A Real Young Girl (1976), 14-year-old Alice reluctantly returns home to provincial southwest France from boarding school for the summer. Physically mature for her age (played by a 20-year-old Charlotte Alexandra), Alice is already exploring her sexuality. The film opens with a voiceover in which she introduces herself and immediately expresses dread at the habitual boredom and loneliness of the months ahead. The title suggests universality and anonymity, except that Alexandra’s voice is dubbed by Breillat’s older sister, and the film is adapted from her semi-autobiographical novel The Opening. Which is to say, the film is unmistakably personal. The title’s implication of virginity is also challenged by the character’s adolescent sexual awakening. She’s granted particular agency in her coming-of-age exploits as both subject and narrator of the film.
There’s instant hostility when Alice returns home, particularly with her mother, as though her parents are fearful of and estranged by her newfound precociousness. Reticence is palpable in the house, and with the silence comes a hyperfixation on audible and visual banalities: flies caught on sticky traps, tea pouring from a kettle, broken eggs, jam spread on toast, munching, slurping, chicken entrails. Ordinarily images of basic domesticities, these close-ups transform into erotic illusions and sexualize monotony, conflating daily ennui with fantasy and desire.
As Alice becomes infatuated with Jim, a young worker employed by her father, Breillat remains characteristically blunt in her depiction of sex and puberty. Feminine sexuality is liberally presented in a repulsive and shocking manner. In one particular scene, Alice slips a spoon into her vagina under the kitchen table beside her parents; in a later dreamlike sequence, Jim attempts to insert an earthworm in its place. Alice’s pleasure takes precedence over the viewer’s, whose perspective is not necessarily made to be pleasant or attractive. The film’s near-pornographic sequences ultimately lead to censorship concerns, and, compounded by distribution issues, its release was delayed until the year 2000. Much of the dialogue was mixed in post-production, often producing a discordant effect between voices and moving lips. This technical disjunction both heightens the film’s surreal quality and echoes Alice’s own disgust and alienation as she struggles to reconcile her sense of self with her sexualized body: “I can’t accept the proximity of my face and my vagina,” she reflects.
A Real Young Girl screens tonight, March 1, at Metrograph as part of the series “Sex is Confusion.”
