Thanks for the memories!

A Masterpiece!

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This is one of the movies I could easily rate as one of the most hateful movies of all time. I saw it some time ago on TV, as the last thing on that day, so, luckily, it couldn't spoil much of the rest of my day.But I imagine myself what would have been had I seen this on big screen, having paid for it. I think I would have asked myself: "Did I really need to see this ?" Worst thing is it doesn't get that bad, to make you walk out on it, until the last few minutes, but, when it gets bad, it gets obnoxious.I wonder what made the director want to do this movie, then, I remembered that this species of film directors exist for quite some time, who want to stir controversy at all costs, and who live on the hype, and not on the money their movies make.Having said all that I think that this movie could have been saved at least partially, if that last sequence of events had been set only in the imagination of the young girl. All the movie is about the build-up of hate from the main character towards her sister (and her mom, for her indifference), so I could have understood it. But then the director said: "Well, let's make it real. Just for shock's sake. I bet every film critic will have something to say about this."1* (because 0 is not an option on IMDb, unfortunately).

I adore Catherine Breillat. Her films really get at the core of the war (and it's a war) between men and women. Gone is any trace of silliness and sentimentality. This film, Fat Girl (aka For My Sister) was the first film of hers I saw, and it's still a favorite. The film centers around 2 sisters, one seductive and one slovenly and fat, yet the fat one seems to know what's going on better than her (at least physically) more attractive sister. The scenes where an Italian suitor tries to seduce the attractive sister are difficult to watch, because they have so much truth in them. Many people dislike Breillat's film intensely, usually American critics. Mind you, the critics of Breillat's films aren't the usual, religious fundamentalists. They are usually "educated", liberal critics who are supposed to be open minded, but seems to shut down their minds when reviewing Breillat's films. They take scenes out of context (like right wing fundies do when they criticise films they don't like), and start attacking Breillat herself, instead of looking at her work. She's been compared to the Marquis de Sade, not in terms of S/M sex, but in the tone of her work regarding relationships (many people have never read de Sade. His work is about much more than bondage). Watching interviews with her is as fascinating as her films. Her films are very bleak and cynical, yet there is more truth in one frame of Fat Girl (and Breillat's other work) than in an entire season of Sex and the City (I would have loved to see her as "special guest director" on Sex and the City. It would have been the best episode), or many American films that are pretending to be "edgy" about sex, but in fact end up being childish. Many people dislike the ending of this film, saying it doesn't fit in with the rest of the movie. The ending fits in perfectly with the tone of the film (and of the character it most affects). I think the ending is so unique that many people just can't accept it. This (along with Anatomy of Hell) are amongst the best of her films. To have a filmmaker as perceptive as her in this day and age is something we should all be grateful for. See Sex is Comedy as well. It's a companion piece to this film. Brilliant Breillat.

a true portrait of some incredibly immature people you can't possibly come to care one bit about, who flop from one impulse or random surface emotion to another, lie to and absent-mindedly manipulate each other, with loads of prurient underage sex that adds nothing to the story, and a supremely lazy ending that i wish like hell i could get out of my memory. if you want to believe the above reviewers who say it's all poignant and intimate and all that, well go right ahead and see it. but when you hate the vicious ending and can't get it out of your head ever and it gives you the creeps every time you think of it, well, i did try to warn you. i've seen a couple of her films (this will be the last ever), and she seems to take a very schizophrenic delight in openly wallowing in the permissive/sordid lives of her characters, only to kill them out of nowhere, ultimately an incredibly dull moralizing prudishness masked as curiosity. maybe this smelled like a big windup to some big revelation to her, but to me it just stunk.

Devastating portrait of heterosexuality in a mess. A holiday romance between an beautiful virgin and a bland seducer is anatomised to show every twist and turn of the manipulations involved when a boy tries to get his dick inside a Romantically-inclined girl. The relationship begs many questions, not least why heterosexual sex needs to be conducted under the cloud of subterfuge. All of this is witnessed by the girl's overweight younger sister, a heretic against society's body fascism who carries not just excess body fat but a cynicism about men and relationships which belies her age to a frightening degree.The long central sex scene in the sisters' shared bedroom is painful and authentic, with a morbid humour. The adults in the film - a workaholic bourgeois father, his neurotic wife and the blowzy Italian mama of the boy who indulges in over-dramatic posturing, suggest that the troubled teens have little but hypocrisy and pathology to look forwards to in adulthood.At the end of the film, something truly shocking and horrible happens, after a long and hair-raising driving sequence as terrifying as anything in Duel. The ending is contentious and a deliberate non-sequitur. It seems to be suggesting that the truth about male/female sexuality is a murderous fury from the male end combined with a retreat into self-protective emotional catatonia in the female. A film which has been a social comedy-drama turns into a transgressive fantasy, and the effect leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth, not least because some of the possible readings involve the younger girl both willing and needing the event to happen in order to liberate her from the prison of her family and the oppressive beauty of her sister.