Okay, so my friend let me borrow about nine movies to watch and critique, and this one was the first on the list.To give a really crude summary, the story is about two sisters of ages 15 and 12, who are on a vacation with their parents. The older one is pretty, thin, and flirty (taking after her mother), and the younger one is fat and often forgotten. Her name is Anaïs. The older girl, Elena, meets a boy, who seduces her into sleeping with him. Her mum finds out about it and decides to drag the girls home. However, on the way home, Elena and her mother are violently killed by an outlaw, and Anaïs is raped - but denies to the police that she was.
Okay, now for the critique. I jump around a bit, so until I get better at this, forgive me.
The movie is all in French. I usually love French films, because I feel like they have a really different perspective of the world than American filmmakers have. Plus, they aren't as afraid to sort of push the envelope - they tackle subjects that I've seen American films water down, and make them real and controversial, as they should be. I like that.
However, when a film is in a different language, it's hard to tell if their acting is very good or not...at least in the way they speak. But from what I got, all of the emotion was realistic. I mean, everything else that goes into it is pretty universal.
In the beginning, I thought the older sister was a bit of a prat to an extreme, almost unrealistic degree. She and her sister are always together in the movie, and the older sister spends a great deal of her time putting down Anaïs, calling her fat, a pig, etc... It was a little overboard, but I'm willing to pass it off as sibling rivalry. I've never had a sibling, and therefore have no way to gauge sibling rivalry, but I've heard that it can be pretty bad.
Plus, we find out later that Elena's parents' condition for letting her out is that she has to bring Anaïs with her. I can completely see how that would make the older sister frustrated.
Anaïs, you can definitely tell, isn't too cool with being constantly ridiculed. Obviously. Of the two girls, she is the least like her mother. Her sister can have anything - the boy, the pretty dress, the romance - and she knows that her sister only regards her as a nuisance, a "ball and chain." She longs to feel comfortably sexual, like her sister, and states that she wants her "first time" with someone to be with no one special so that she's already "broken in" by the time she meets her love. This will spare him of the complications of being a girl's first lover, she believes.
As for the boy, Fernando, I think he had even ME convinced that he loved Elena! He's honest with her, right off the bat, that he's been a bit of a playboy in the past, and she confides in him that she's afraid she'll just be like every other girl he's been with if she gives herself up to him. He takes time to meet her family and talk with her...it really did SEEM like he had become a different person for her...until he started requesting sexual favours and pressuring her when she refused. He even had the bollocks to say something along the lines of, "If you don't, I'll have to find an older girl, and I don't want to do that."
Typical jerk, you know?
Anyway, when he finally gets his way, the couple doesn't even mind that little (har har) Anaïs is in the room with them. S'matter of fact, there is a LOT of sexual activity in this movie, and all of it happens in the room that the sisters share, as if Anaïs is invisible. She cries herself to sleep as it all happens.
The only time Elena actually starts being nice to her sister is the day after Fernando has had his way with her...I have my suspicions that it was not out of guilt for having made her sister listen, but out of fear that Anaïs would tell their parents.
Every now and then, Anaïs is shown singing a haunting little tune to herself. At first, the song is about being bored and lonely, but throughout the film, it becomes steadily more full of self-loathing and contains more and more suicidal undertones. To be honest, I was expecting the end of the movie to include suicide. That was my guess. Turns out, it was quite the opposite.
Now, the ENDING was insane, guys. I don't think I've ever seen such an unexpected conclusion. Up until maybe the last ten minutes, everything in the movie was really...calming. The colours, the sounds, the way people interacted with each other...all of it was very mellow and intimate. Really, it just wasn't the kind of movie where you would expect any sort of deviation from all of that.
Tired from having driven all night after whisking the girls away from their vacation place, the mother decides to pull into a rest stop to sleep for the night. Without any warning at all, a criminal hacks through the windshield with a hatchet, slamming it into the side of Elena's head just one second later. Then he grabs at the mother's clothing before strangling her to death. Anaïs watches all of this with a blank expression, as if she doesn't care - even as she flees from the car, slowly backing away from the murderer of her family.
The man forces her onto the ground and rapes her (it's quite a disturbing scene, really...I've never seen a more grisly rape in film before, psychologically speaking...I can't BELIEVE they filmed this with such a young actress, but I'm glad they went ahead and did it). Odd thing is, halfway through the rape, Anaïs is clinging to him, like someone holds a lover. As if she doesn't mind. Not as though she enjoys it by any means, but with an indifferent face. When he's done, he leaves her alive and runs off.
She doesn't report the rape, when police come to the scene of the crimes.
I froze, wide-eyed, and my hand FLEW to my mouth as soon as the windshield shattered - and I think I stayed in that position until the credits kicked in, actually. I think it was awesome that the shot where the man breaks the window and kills Elena was done from the perspective of someone sitting in the car. It really gave me that sense of panic that the family must have felt, being awakened by this crazy man.
There are a lot of theories as to why Anaïs chose not to tell the police that the man had raped her. Stockholm Syndrome is one such theory, but I don't buy into it. If that were the case, the rape scene would be the only scene in the movie, and the rest could be discarded. No. I think that the point was a combination of the twisted fulfillment of Anaïs's desire for her "first time" to be with no one special, as well as the gratefulness she had towards the man for having chosen her, instead of Elena, for his sexual outlet.
Up until the end, I thought it was really strange that most of the movie focused on Elena, instead of Anaïs, whom the movie is named for in its English title.
I feel like everyone should see this movie. It realistically portrays the struggles of girls, the psychological damage that being overweight and ridiculed can create, and the ignorance of wealthy parents. Oh, and it also made me afraid of rest stops even more than I already was.
Stars: 4.5/5
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