A prize given to François Ozon during the Cannes Film Festival is not one the French filmmaker can put on his mantelpiece, if he has one. The French branch of the Ukrainian feminist protest group FEMEN has awarded Ozon the “2013 Golden palm of assholes” via a Tweet, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The organization Osez le féminisme (Dare Feminism) meanwhile described remarks Ozon made in an interview with the trade paper a week ago as “the spew of the day.”
Ozon brought to the festival’s competition “Young & Beautiful,” a drama about a 17-year-old Parisian high-schooler, Isabelle (played by 23-year-old model turned actress Marine Vacth), who, for unexplained reasons of her own, becomes a high-class call girl. She relishes the power Ozon gives her in relation to the johns, possibly very different to the power (or lack thereof) that prostitutes are normally expected to have. The trailer (below) suggests that, for the emotionally detached Isabelle, the actual sex is a blur.
Talking to the Reporter, Ozon responded to interviewer Rhonda Richford’s statement “Men and women seem to have different reactions to the film” by saying:
“I think women understand the film more than men. I think men are afraid because it’s like, ‘Oh, my God. There is all that in the head of a woman?’ She is very powerful. But I think women can really be connected with this girl because it’s a fantasy of many women to do prostitution. That doesn’t mean they do it, but the fact to be paid to have sex is something which is very obvious in feminine sexuality.”
When Richford disagreed, Ozon said: “I think to be an object in sexuality is something very obvious, you know, to be desired, to be used. There is a kind of passivity that women are looking for.”
It was the “it’s a fantasy of many women to do prostitution” comment that provoked the reaction from such media outlets as Metro News France. Placed on the defensive, Ozon tweeted in response, “Obviously I wasn’t talking about women in general, just the characters in my film.”
On Saturday, the Reporter noted the comments of French women politicians. Socialist Party spokesperson Laurence Rossignol tweeted: “Mr. Ozon, could you keep your fantasies to yourself and avoid assigning them to us? Thank you.”
Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, minister for women’s rights, said: “The movie presents us with his view of the world. François Ozon’s look at women seems reductive or too generalized. It’s terrifying to trivialize that there is a casualness in prostitution. This is not true. Casualness and prostitution are contradictory. This shows that it is also important that we hear the voices of women directors because women’s views of women are not at all the same as those of men.”
Ozon has said that, instead of prostitution, he could have easily explored “anorexia, drugs, suicide” in depicting the teenage need to purge “the violence inside you need to express and you don’t know how.”
He wanted to draw attention to Isabelle’s innocence, he added, “because she doesn’t realize the danger of this situation.” This aligns her with the two student prostitutes, the subject of an article by an Elle reporter played by Juliette Binoche, in Małgorzata Szumowska’s “Elles” (2011).
However, “Young & Beautiful” is more likely to draw comparisons (and has already done so) with Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour” (1967), in which Catherine Deneuve’s frigid housewife entertains fantasies of degradation and becomes a brothel inmate, leading eventually to her husband’s crippling and emasculation.
That Charlotte Rampling, who starred as the fantasizing writer in Ozon’s “Swimming Pool,” shows up toward the end of “Young & Beautiful” suggests the director may be playing with levels of reality critics haven’t fully grasped. That’s just a suspicion.
Unlike “Belle de Jour,” “Young & Beautiful” apparently doesn’t offer clues to its young prostitute’s psychological motives or, unlike “Elles,” grapple with the sociological causes that turn beautiful young women into prostitutes.
It does, however, throw up a mass of ambiguities and provocations — enhanced by the director’s quotes — that will keep it in the public eye when it reaches theaters. Sundance Selects has picked it up for U.S. distribution.
Watch Marine Vacth in the “Young & Beautiful” trailer: