Young & Beautiful (2013)

“Isabelle” (Marine Vacth) has been chatting with her younger brother “Victor” (Fantin Ravat) about her losing her virginity. It looks like it’s “Felix” (Lucas Prisor) whom she’s lined up and he duly obliges. He’s not just after sex, though, he wants to engage with her - but she has got what she wanted from him, and now heads to the city where she embarks on a career at €300 an head. She has no real interest in these older men, nor even in the sex - it’s the preamble and the memories that she likes. When one of her regulars has the ultimate orgasm, she has to flee before the police begin to investigate. They are not daft, and are quickly at her door where she, still seventeen, has to explain to her mother just where she got a great wad of Euros from. Furious, she (Géraldine Pailhas) insists that she see a therapist, but might she just be better off with a lad her own age like “Alex” (Laurent Delbecque) or, when she inserts her secret SIM into her phone and a number comes up, might she just go back to her old habits? What this doesn't try to explain is what triggered her behaviour. Her sex with “Felix” was perfectly consensual, if a little perfunctory, so what drove her to hook up with a collection of wealthy older gents? “Isabelle”, as a character, just isn’t developed at all here and so watching her inflagrante delicto with some random men just came across as some softly photographed porn. Vacth delivers confidently, but I couldn’t quite fathom the dynamic between her and her brother, and though she is quite convincing when we see her, Pailhas hasn’t really enough until the last twenty minutes to get her teeth into. It’s always good to see Charlotte Rampling on screen, and her presence towards the end gives us a slightly quirky sense of closure, but I was underwhelmed by this slightly repetitious drama.