A young and beautiful woman has untold amounts of power over men and most women don’t realize it until we’re long past it. Francois Ozon’s Jeune et Jolie is about a teenage girl who goes from virgin to prostitute in two seasons. Summer, she loses her virginity to a German tourist at the beach. It’s a miserable experience teaching an important lesson about what men want and how little what a woman wants has anything to do with it. The sex wasn’t about her pleasure, but about his.
By Fall, she’s built up a successful business as a young prostitute in Paris lying about her age and servicing a mostly older clientele.
We’re left to pick up the pieces and wonder what went wrong. But Ozon isn’t going to make that easy. “Lea” isn’t punished for her wicked ways as one might expect. She isn’t drugged up on heroin and left to die in a ditch. She isn’t beaten to a pulp by an angry John. She doesn’t get pregnant. She just makes a lot of money and enjoys the power and control the job affords her.
By the end of the film, long after her mother has found out, long after she’s been lectured about the dangers of prostitution “Lea” is still drawn to it, like a bad addiction. She likes it, that’s the dirty secret. The movie asks us then to make a judgment. Jeune et Jolie doesn’t dress itself up as a tragedy. It isn’t soft core porn masked to look like a film that will still right the wrongs of society — that “Lea” will be appropriately punished and transformed. What she wants for herself isn’t what others imagine. She doesn’t want love, nor does she see being a whore as particularly bad.
Though “Lea” does develop feelings, sort of, for one of her elderly clients, which causes somewhat of an emotional shift, we never really see who she really is. Ozon has written her as a moving symbol for something. In the end, it doesn’t feel real enough to have bothered. This is one of the dangers of trying to tell the story of the inner world of a 17-year-old girl.
Jeune et Jolie is a beautifully made film. Marine Vacth is a traditional French beauty in a long tradition of them. There are many films just like this one that focus on a very young, very beautiful young actress. The film delivers what it promised — it shows plenty of nudity and sex, however soulless it might ultimately be.
If we pin “Lea” down to our own standards of morality we might miss who she really is. But are we brave enough to confront that? Does that make her a sociopath? What could have produced such a person? How terrifying to imagine one’s own daughter living a double life like that. Ozon doesn’t answer any of those questions. He leaves us alone with our thoughts, our longings, our secret desires, and our untold truths to figure it out for ourselves.
