Review: Young & Beautiful

City Paper grade: B+

After the atypical, semi-personal In the House and Potiche, François Ozon returns to the subject of young women’s bodies and how they use them in Young & Beautiful, where Marine Vacth plays a nubile teenager who starts turning tricks after losing her virginity. In its bare outlines, the plot is the stuff of sexploitation, but Ozon keeps himself clinically detached, and Vacth, a model with little previous acting experience, is a beauteous blank slate, her limpid eyes soaking up each assignation. From the first shot, of her young brother ogling her topless body through binoculars, she’s on display, and it often feels like she’s watching herself from a distance as well. When she loses her virginity the summer between high school and college, she’s confronted mid-lay by a figure stepping out of the shadows that turns out to be a vision of herself. Later, she watches porn on her laptop, the camera isolating the spectacle of a woman’s (feigned) pleasure. Then, she pulls a Belle de Jour, setting up encounters online while studying at the Sorbonne and still living with her parents. Some meetings are dangerous, some might even be pleasurable, but her inner self is locked away and Ozon’s camera is locked off, holding each immaculate frame without telegraphing the intended response. It’s a pristine and chilly movie, beautiful and remote, like the woman at its center.