'Young and Beautiful,' the story of a teenage prostitute, is unnervingly dispassionate
Fran莽ois Ozon鈥檚 Cannes hit 鈥淵oung and Beautiful鈥� is an unnervingly dispassionate movie about a 17-year-old girl from a 鈥済ood鈥� middle-class family who willingly and inexplicably becomes a prostitute. Isabelle (Marine Vacth) lives at home with her kid brother (Fantin Ravat) and her mother (a fine G茅raldine Pailhas) and stepfather (Fr茅d茅ric Pierrot). She doesn鈥檛 lack for money and is popular, if standoffish, at school. Although it鈥檚 implied that her prostitution, which we see in sometimes graphic detail, is some sort of payback directed at her divorced dad, Ozon doesn鈥檛 really spell anything out for us. He uses Vacth, a beauty who somewhat resembles the young Nastassja Kinski or Dominique Sanda, for her eerie, implacable hauteur. There is a mask behind her mask.
Ozon also attempts, less than successfully, to set up some sort of equivalence between Isabelle鈥檚 hooking (late afternoons, weekdays only, in hotels) and the other financial transactions that we see, ranging from her baby-sitting gigs to the girls in her brother鈥檚 class selling kisses for 鈧�5 apiece. The slippery slope in this movie is all too conveniently, and unconvincingly, slippery. Grade: B. (Unrated.)
