Films That Are Good In Bed

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The heroines of Breillat's best films are younger than the Baise-moi babes: girls trying to fathom sex and romance while in the sights of some very avid men. Fat Girl, Breillat's latest and best work, divides the heroine in two: Elena (Roxane Mesquida), a pretty 15-year-old who already knows her aphrodisiac effect on men, and her sister Anais (Anais Reboux)--fat, sullen and full of resentful love for the girl who invites, into the bedroom they share, a horny rich kid for a night of extended erotic negotiation.

This scene contains hanky-panky the Hollywood solons would never allow, but it is more notable for its delicate juggling of flattery, force and debating skills; the boy is studying to be a lawyer. And all the time Anais watches, as if taking notes for the day (she hopes) when she too will have a man to play with, to treat her roughly, to ruin her. Fat Girl could be a compendium of Hollywood teen movies--it is by turns a story of sisterhood, a coming-of-age comedy and a horror tragedy--if it weren't so tres, tres Breillat. Which, this time, means brilliant.

Brilliant, bizarre and, like the best art-sex films, fully human. For unlike serial killing, or saving the world by beating up a bad guy, or most other favorite Hollywood tropes, the act of sex is something most people do quite often and, no matter how often they do it, think about even more. It's inherently dramatic: courtship, suspense, climax. Emotions lead up to it, tensions surround it. It is one of the loveliest and most fraught aspects of being human. Hollywood films ought to try making cinematic sense of sex. And they can, now that Europe has shown the way.