Just saw this one last night. It was fairly memorable, if a bit pretentious and meandering, as European films tend to be at times.
My quetions are basically about the end. I was reading IMDb boards, but those can be a bit difficult to navigate, so I thought I’d bring my questions here.
Was the ending really…real? It all felt so off to me. When the guy breaks in, neither the mother or the sister move at all. They remain asleep. The mother only wakes up when she’s being strangled. Anais’s reaction is so…off. She doesn’t seem to react at all. I know, some people go into shock when this sort of thing happens, but everything felt off.
Which is why I wondered–fantasy of Anais? People have pointed out it’s what she wanted–to lose her virginity to an absolute no one. Someone she couldn’t love. It’s twisted and sick, but it is a possibility, isn’t it?
Of course, you could argue that she wanted it to happen, despite it being real. And I read a theory that the sister (the older one, Elaine) planned for it to happen.
The fantasy bit does play into the whole female worth being tied in with beauty/sexuality. She wants to be seen as real, as worthy, just like her older sister.
Finally, my thoughts on the underage nudity were conflicted. I’m not a stickler for that kind of thing. It did seem like the director was trying to make a comment on the way she saw herself and the way we see her. We look at her body and don’t see her as inherently sexual, despite her breasts and so on, due to her being overweight. It’s like we a-sexualize her.
Well. Thoughts?
Bumping this up…I was so hoping to get a discussion going. Ah well.
It never occurred to me to consider the ending anything other than completely real (although also rather random and tragic).
It should be noted that the director is (a) female, (b) French, and © very casual about all types of nudity in her films, so I think her sensibility toward the girl’s nudity would be very different than if the film was from the US.
Haven’t seen it, though I thought I’d entered some kind of alternate universe when I was watching the week-long IFC sex special back in August. They showed a clip from the end of Sex Is Comedy, then went on and on talking about Fat Girl. It was very confusing.
Checking out what was up with that on imdb, apparently the writer/director of Fat Girl made Sex Is Comedy based on her experience during the making of Fat Girl. The odd part was that she used the same actress (the Fat Girl’s sister) as the lead in Sex Is Comedy, and reproduced the anal scene with the same blocking, position, and even damn near the same wardrobe. (Though I don’t think the scene in Sex Is Comedy is supposed to be anal.)
She must have really enjoyed filming that scene to make a whole film about it.
I guess I was just looking at the fact that it seemed so unreal, the way it was filmed. And coupled with her saying that she wanted her first time to be with someone she didn’t care about. Also, the way she was sort of putting her arms around the guy when he was raping her seemed like an odd way to act. So that was where the fantasy/dream angle came from.
In any case, she seems to be taking a very different view of the rape than most people would. The part at the end when the policemen are acompanying her out of the woods and they say, “She claims she wasn’t raped” is strange. But if we interpret that as she had sex but she didn’t view it as rape…then maybe it changes.
Fantasy or real, it was just a very odd wa of depicting a typical stranger rape scene.