AN “ARTCORE” movie may be hard to define, but you’ll know one when you see it at the local art house. Unbearably ponderous, these movies can mope along on almost nothing. For action, they show long-faced characters silently brushing their teeth. For repartee, they have chain-smoking lovers volleying the most banal of truisms. For a climax, they have, well, climaxes, which are often and numerous, with characters shagging like convicts on furlough. It’s porn for poseurs, and a hallmark of this new genre is French director Catherine Breillat’s seedy 1998 “Romance.” In it, schoolteacher Marie feels dishonored when her live-in boyfriend turns abstinent. Acting out her shame, Marie takes up with a complete stranger played by Rocco Siffreddi, better known for such movies as “Intercourse with a Vampire” and the Buttman series. Rocco helps Marie forget the boyfriend, but that’s not what she wants. She is, by choice, committed to loving her dastardly Sartre-reading bedmate. “It’s a question of integrity,” she says before dumping Rocco. She then becomes involved with the principal of her school, a homely old coot who claims to have bedded over 10,000 women. (His chin-scratchings on the secrets of sexual success provide the only comedy in this improbably humorless movie.) Breillat’s characters stand in for competing arguments about love. Marie represents the full array of physical and emotional yearnings. Thus she constantly suffers. Her twit of a boyfriend believes in the thrill of the chase, but little else. In turn the little nihilist also gets his due. And the old principal embodies the plainspoken wisdom found in the children’s book “Everyone Poops,” but in his case the operative verb would start with an F. He ends up the winner, getting the girl, love, family, all of it, without any suffering. Movies can be pornographic because porn is all images. They have a much harder time harnessing the power of argument. And were Breillat serious about argument, she would write essays and books. (She has, incidentally, written novels that tend to be controversial for their, you guessed it, pornography.) But movies lack the verbal traction necessary for dialectic. “Romance” fails to be, and probably never intended to be, anything more than a skin flick for guilt-ridden intellectuals. The same shortcomings, and then some, plague Breillat’s new and more ambitious movie “Fat Girl.” Here is another film in which humans compete with their sexual organs for dominance over the story. And, as in “Romance,” the humans lose. But for prurience to be satisfied, the mind must be distracted. So there is a debate underway. The story’s two main characters represent opposing arguments. The older sister, a 15-year-old girl played by an 18-year-old actress, believes sex, especially the first time in one’s life, should be had with someone you love. The younger sister, a 12-year-old for whom they used a body double, subscribes to the “Everyone Poops” school of thought: By insisting on love with your sex, you only put yourself in danger and make it harder to get the physical satisfaction you require. The older sister pays dearly for her illusions. Preyed upon by a law student several years her senior, she is vulnerable to his lies precisely because she wants to be loved. The more experienced young man degrades her totally in a pair of acts that surely violate any number of public health codes along with every rule of basic decency. Sandwiched between this and another, concluding, horror is a brief interlude of sisterly friendship. This longish scene is delightfully played by the young actresses; it makes one wish Breillat were interested in children for purposes other than molestation. (Seeing this movie yourself would be far worse punishment than my ruining the ending, but if you’d like to, you should skip to the last paragraph.) Toward the end, the two sisters and their mother, who’d all been vacationing in the south of France, head home. And after several tedious minutes of absolutely event-less road footage, they drive into a rest stop. It is here that the younger sister is deflowered–by a homicidal maniac who comes out of nowhere to kill the older sister and the mother. The murderer then tackles the 12-year-old girl to the ground and begins to pull off her clothing. Cut to the crime scene hours later with police and paramedics in attendance. The younger sister insists to the police that she was not raped, meaning she had volunteered to have sex with the killer. “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to,” she says. Strangely enough, reviewers in the Denver Rocky Mountain News and the Village Voice plead that the ending is not the real ending, necessarily. It can be interpreted, they say, as occurring only in the mind of the character. Such apologies are totally groundless. Breillat’s pornographic movies are structured by arguments over sex, and the winning argument is the most impersonal and detached. Why shouldn’t the young girl who wants to lose her virginity give it up to a man who seconds ago killed her mother and sister? If he’s game and she’s game, what’s stopping them? This heartless perversion is simply the logical result of Breillat’s own ideas. Love, morality, movies about little girls who keep their clothes on–that’s for losers. “Fat Girl” is kiddy porn–pitched at the same poseurs who gobbled up “Romance.” Though less graphic than “Romance,” the sex is far more alarming. The only reason one can imagine this movie hasn’t been banned in the United States is that would-be censors fell asleep during one of the interminable, action-less digressions. “Fat Girl” was, however, banned in Ontario. One of the Canadian censors opined that the movie wouldn’t suffer much if the offending scenes were removed. Breillat and company did not oblige. Perhaps they know: Artcore minus the core is still not art. David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
