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Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Who payed the critics

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Dreadfully Boring

I rented "36 Fillette" on DVD. There was little in the way of explanation or translation. The opening screen and title were not even translated, and the picture was fuzzy like a home movie or something, perhaps purposefully since this was a small family on vacation at the beach.The mother father, and their 14 year old daughter, and 16 year old son rent a trailer at the beach for the summer.The son and daughter are cooped up like chickens and squabbling constantly, so immediately both get on your nerves, but mostly the daughter ... something is just bothering her.Well, I guess it turns out to be raging hormones. The title someone said in the American version was "Virgin" and the main goal of this movie seems to be to get this awful girl laid."Lily" does not read, and makes fun of those who do, though she professed to want to be a writer when she grows up. She disobeys her parents and bothers her brother constantly, the reason is that she has raging hormones I suppose.The movie seems to cover a day or two, and involves Lily going to a disco with her brother and then dumping him there alone while she goes off with an "aging playboy" as someone referred to him.She seems to tease and play games with everyone until they are tired of it, and at the end she does succeed at fooling a young man into deflowering her, and then curses at him and goes off on her own ... a theme in the movie, I walk alone being a song that is played several times.What this movie is about or is trying to say I have really no idea. Perhaps how hard women have it in life, or how hard men have it in life ... could be either. It was hard to watch all of this girls squirming and tantrums.One thing is that she was well cast as physically she was a beautiful Venus type of girl, full-figured and completely un-self-conscious and a force of nature which nothing can control. But she does not seem to be any better at the end of the movie or have undergone anything but a small tear of the hymen in this movie, hardly a dramatic transformation.I gave the movie a 4 for its attempt at real life and the guts to show what it did in the way it did, but I could not recommend it, nor would I want to see it again, or would I see it if I knew it was going to be so blah.

Spoilers herein.In the late seventies, actress/writer Breillat made a film ("Young Girl") about the nearly suicidal angst of female sexual discovery/fantasy. It is worth watching for the raw honesty, but it misses being a whole film. Five years later, she wrote a Fellini film, not a good one. It was during the period where he felt his only true film was "Nights of Cabiria." And five years after that, she produced this synthesis of "Cabiria" and "Young Girl."It is still not a complete film. Breillat's of the distinctly French school who thinks all the creative work of a film is in thinking it up, in finding that wrinkle in human emotions in which to ramble. I recommend that you stick to the originals rather than spending time with this unsuccessful experiment.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 4: Has some interesting elements.

This film was made in France in the late 1980s, but it is unimaginable that it could be made in Hollywood then or now. The US studio mind set sees adolescence in 'American Pie' terms and the current wave of legislative hysteria over child porn precludes any thoughtful treatment of how adolescents deal with their emerging sexuality.Working outside these constraints in France Catherine Breillat has been able to craft a film which is occasionally startlingly frank but never exploitive. She looks unblinkingly at the unruliness of adolescent sexual behavior and does not shy away from depicting the protagonist of the title as part seducer as well as part victim.Delphine Zentout is sensationally good in depicting a young girl with rampaging hormones in a hurry to become a woman. She plays her as unashamedly surly, self absorbed and difficult, without a trace of cuteness. This is a film in which every note rings true.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)This is a love story off the beaten track clearly in the tradition of Louis Malle and Francois Truffaut, told without prudishness or gratuitous violence.The title refers to a children's dress size that the 14-year-old lead, Lili, played with snap by Delphine Zentout, is bursting out of. Billed as a "French Lolita," Zentout is not all that fetching at first glance. She's a chubbette with light skin and thick black hair and not exactly pretty. But she has intriguing eyes and a saucy way about her.Lili is "discovering" her sexuality, but won't let herself be impregnated. The playboy, played with grace and economy by Jean-Pierre Leaud, falls in love with her in spite of himself and "tolerates" her reluctance while being partially satisfied in other ways, one of which we used to call a "cold f..." They are a believable match because sexually they are equal: she precocious, he experienced.Catherine Beillat directs without sentimentality while guiding Zentout to an interpretation that transcends the American brat style and leads us to a thoughtful view of feminine sexuality.