The Cannes Film Festival 2013 is just started and we want to talk about François Ozon’s Young and Beautiful (Jeune et Jolie), an exploration of a 17-year-old girl’s willful entry into the world of prostitution. In some ways, it treads similar territory to Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty, but whereas that film maintained a detached, ambiguous tone toward the material.
Vacth plays Isabelle, a 17-year-old girl in a well-off family, who, as the film begins is still a virgin. That doesn’t last so long though, as she more or less sets a personal goal to sleep with a goofy-but-handsome German guy before the end of her family’s seaside vacation.
We remember that François Ozon is a French film director and screenwriter whose films are usually characterized by sharp satirical wit and a freewheeling view on human sexuality.
He has achieved international acclaim for his films 8 femmes (2002) and Swimming Pool (2003). Ozon is considered to be one of the most important French film directors in the new “New Wave” in French cinema such as Jean-Paul Civeyrac, Philippe Ramos, and Yves Caumon, as well as a group of French filmmakers associated with a “cinema du corps/cinema of the body”. Go to Cannes from London.
