The films of the Catherine Breillat regularly run into trouble, often because of Breillat’s use of what looks like unsimulated sex. Fat Girl (aka À Ma Soeur aka Story of a Whale) isn’t as explicitly explicit as Romance – which featured a real porn star doing the business with a young actress (fake, she said; not so, said he) – but it’s upfront enough about what’s going on. When it came out in 2001, the world still hadn’t quite got its head around the fact that sex – naked people doing whatever it was you wanted to watch them doing – was on tap 24/7. And so everyone focused on the film’s key sequence, in which a young woman and a slightly older man, get down to business while her sister is asleep (or not) in the same room.
Breillat’s films are usually about the male/female sexual dynamic, both as it is – coercive – and as it might be, which is even more problematic, in Breillat’s telling at least.
Here, two girls approach that all-you-can-eat buffet from different directions. Elena (Roxane Mesquida) is hot and all the boys want her. Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), her younger sister, is fat and they don’t. In any case she’s younger than Elena and hasn’t quite arrived at that age. Opening scene: the two girls are walking into the town near where their family has a holiday villa. As they walk, they talk about boys. Anaïs, in so many words, tells her sister that she’s obviously a hot number and all the boys want her, but after three days or so, the boys have got what they want and are trying to make themselves scarce. Elena, giving as good as she gets, replies that the boys don’t even want to get close to Anaïs in the first place, because she’s fat.
Case stated, Breillat delivers the proof when the two girls get to town and arrive at a cafe, where Elena is immediately chatted up by a sexy, slightly older Italian with faltering French. While Elena and Fernando (Libero De Rienzo) trade looks before getting down to some serious kissing, Anaïs tucks into a banana split.
Breillat brilliantly captures the sweaty, saliva-strand longing of the young, but she’s even more interested in the power dynamics of male/female sexual encounters. Which brings us to the film’s central scene. Here, with a camera that isn’t being coy or relying on edits to construct a romanticised picture, she observes coolly as Fernando tries to get Elena to have sex with him, while Elena tries to resist and Anaïs, awake on the other side of the shared bedroom, tries to pretend she isn’t there. The pressuring, the wheedling, the rationalising, it’s highly evocative, right down to the rustle of the bed sheets caught in such a way that they act as a sighing commentary.
The double standard. Female desire. What men want. Breillat’s interested in all those things, and the way sex distorts relationships. Between scenes featuring Elena and Fernando there are scenes between the two sisters, emphasising how girlish Elena still is, for all her grown-up looks. And how different the two girls’ lives are going to be – the one who is going to be looked at the whole time, and the one who isn’t.
It’s a simple film, with the opening scene between the two sisters and the central sex scene saying most of what Breillat wants to say, though she rounds things off in a way that comes right out of left field, as if to say “and here’s where you end up if we push that logic to its limits”.
It is a wowsers finish to a bold and powerful film that hasn’t lost any of its power over the years. The three key actors are entirely in the groove – fuck-me pouts from Mesquida, sullen moodiness from Reboux (who gave up acting after this and a small role in a TV movie) and trouser-fixated urgency from De Rienzo. All are perfect, but then so is this strange, darkly sparkling film.
Fat Girl – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2026
