Young & Beautiful

Synopsis: After losing her virginity in a passionless summer dalliance, high school student, Isabelle (Marine Vacth), decides to become a call-girl.

François Ozon has a well-established reputation as a cinematic essayist of the sexual mores of the French bourgeoisie. His previous film In The House was one of his most charming efforts in this area. His follow-up, Young & Beautiful, is one of his weakest, an elegantly packaged but underwhelming affair closer in style to Bertolucci’s 1996 soft-core art-house squib, Stealing Beauty, than the recent spate of more sexually bracing films such as Stranger By The Lake, Blue Is The Warmest Colour or, heaven forbid, Nymphomaniac.

Adopting the much-used “four seasons” structure, Young & Beautiful follows Isabelle as she takes up the world’s oldest profession (with no real explanation of how she manages this), gets busted (with no real explanation of how this comes to pass) after one of her clients dies in flagrante delicto, and then tries to adjust to the banality of everyday middle-class probity.

The first part of the film is largely given over to watching Isabelle engage in sex acts with various clients. Whilst some, for better or worse, may find this a bit of a perve-fest, the scenes are not only, like Isabelle herself, coldly dispassionate but dramatically speaking are simply additive and this is rather lazy, and at times heavy-handed (particularly in the use of Françoise Hardy's songs), story-telling. 

The film hits its straps in the middle section when it broaches the conflict between Isabelle’s seeming indifference to her activities and the hypocritical reactions of the adults around her. For a while Ozon seems to be heading into interesting territory as he delves into various aspects of male and female sexuality and society’s repression of it. None of this is developed however and the third act, in which Ozon’s favourite actrice, Charlotte Rampling, turns up as the dead client’s wife in order to have a tête-à-tête with the wench who did for her hubby, enters gimme-a-break territory in its pretentiousness (some may recall the artful languors of Julia Leigh's 2011 film, Sleeping Beauty) whilst also providing an ill-judged reminder of the director’s more substantial efforts with Rampling, Swimming Pool and Under The Sand.

As ever with Ozon, his film is well-presented, the performances are all solid with the sleekly lean and young and remarkably beautiful Vacth effectively portraying the aloof detachment that Ozon presumably instructed her in but all of it together doesn’t amount to much.

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