Jeune et Jolie (Young and Beautiful) is divided into four
parts, one for every season. In the first part, summer, we are introduced to Isabelle
(Marine Vacth), a seemingly insular teenage girl.
On the eve of her seventeenth
birthday and whilst on a family holiday, she goes out determined to sate her
curiosity about sex and does so, on the beach, with a German lad.
She gets the job done in the most matter-of-factly way you can
imagine and then moves on. She is clearly underwhelmed by the whole experience
but this doesn’t seem to dispel her curiosity.
When the season changes into autumn, we learn that after
being offered some extra money pocket by an older man, she not only took him up
on his offer but has now set herself up with her own website et al and is now moonlighting
as a fully fledged internet era call girl called Lea. I'd love to know how she
took those fancy website photos of herself without help.
Now whilst still living under her parents' roof and in between
attending lectures at college, she is meeting clients in hotel rooms and
relieving them of €300, €400, €500 at a time, as often as she can.
All the men seem to know she's lying about her age, purporting
to be 20 years old, and she goes about her new hobby with the same indifference that she did when handing her virginity to the German lad but her
phone keeps pinging with a flood of messages, so it’s clearly very marketable. Which
is probably why the price keeps going up.
Then in winter everything goes wrong. Amongst her plethora
of ‘Johns’, there is one man who actually seems to care a bit about her as a
person.
Unfortunately she proves too much for his heart which expires when he uncharacteristically
asks her to get on top of him. Perhaps that was the way he wanted to go.
The security cameras at the hotel have her recorded, so soon
Isabelle's double life comes to the attention of the police, and ultimately her
parents. Her mother, of course, isn’t terribly impressed and struggles to
understand her daughter's choice of part time job. So she sends her for
therapy.
In the spring, Isabelle is trying to pick up her life as a
student and to have a relationship but is finding it difficult to erase the
past.
The film doesn't judge Isabelle nor attempt to explain her
actions. She didn’t need the money but perhaps she wanted simply to be desired
or perhaps she was just bored and wanted to do something a bit risqué. A better
choice surely than drugs, alcohol or going down her mother's route of having an
affair.
Rest assured, Isabelle remains a conundrum aka a teenager right
to the end.
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