36 Fillette

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Unique C @uniquecliches Sep 11, 2026 Like so many of this director’s movies, this one pushes boundaries in many ways and is not always comfortable to watch. The main character is 14 and longing to lose her virginity while spending her vacation with her dysfunctional family at a campsite. She becomes involved with a much older man, in a relationship that is at times cringeworthy and almost absurd. But the movie commits so fully to its world and characters that you somehow stay with it, and after a while even some of the absurdity stops being so distracting. No one is terribly likable, which, combined with the constant sense of cringe, does not exactly make this the most pleasant viewing experience. See more sarfaraz a @RT40602226 Oct 7, 2013 36 Fillette (English: Virgin or Junior Size 36) a French Film directed by controversial writer-cum-director Catherine Breillat. Starring Delphine Zentout and Jean-Pierre Léaud (in cameo role). Film became controversial for sexual acts between elderly man and young teenage girl Delphine who was 16 at the time. Lili (Delphine Zentout) is 14 year old voluptuous virgin girl - she is having uncontrollable feelings towards men while having aggressive confrontations with her sibling. She flirts with an elderly playboy at café who brings her home - the two engage in little hanky-panky act. Set designing is typical of Catherine films. Delphine portrays the bawdiness of character she plays - Catherine's strong direction levels the willingness and stubbornness. All over the world many people have been real ignorant to the facts that women have lived under stressful pressure of society while going through sexual awakening. Catherine Breillat came out to beware the society and those concerned to rethink about what goes all around us. See more Jul 12, 2012 Boring (and overrated) French film about a boring teenager. See more Dec 18, 2009 Humbert Humbert: Our Hero? The dvd jacket to 36 FILLETTE bills it as "the French Lolita," and while I've never seen Lolita, the only positive thing that I can say about this film is that it's cool to see a female coming of age story, since it's a male dominated story-type. That's where my praise ends, though. 36 FILLETTE is essentially about a girl on a crash course with future emotional problems. She has some psychological complex about sex where she is both fascinated and repulsed by it. The filmmaker seems to think that the best way to show this is to make everything an ambiguous teeter-totter: when an older playboy that she "picks up" (though who picked up to is up for debate) talks about sex, she bristles, but whenever she talks about sex, he bristles. It's just absurd. More absurd is the fact that she is 14. Blah, it's all just a pretty rotten set up and, while I suppose it maybe might possible be read by some small number of people as being about female sexual freedom, it strikes me as exploitative, aimless, and boring. See more Apr 20, 2009 Delphine Zentout is incredibly sexy in this average "coming of age" film See more Feb 25, 2009 This is a film that is similar to that of Truffaut's first feature film, [i]The 400 Blows[/i] in that it has a child not knowing who she is and not knowing what to do because what she yearns for because something that she does not think she can handle. The connections to Truffaut are also there because Jean-Pierre Leaud is in the film and gives Lili advice that would have helped Antoine. This is a film that is intensely engaging but difficult to fight for because of the topic of pedophilia. Briellat never backs down from this and because of that the film succeeds, she does not pull punches and puts everything on screen and we must sit back and take notice. Briellat is a director that must not be ignored and a director that must be analyzed in ordered to better understand the film and to better understand the society around us, because she deals so directly with our concepts of femininity and society. See more Read all reviews

36 Fillette

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