Reseñas de la crítica

Many of [Ozon's] films—from the early short A Summer Dress to the recent feature In the House—end purposely unresolved, with the protagonists recognizing how little they understand their own behavior. Ozon's worldview is an acquired taste, as it stands in opposition to that of modern psychological novels and films (admittedly, I'm a sucker for it myself). Yet in Young & Beautiful, that worldview dovetails with a meaningful critique of current social ills.

The [film's] strategy is to depict the danger and romance of the hooker-by-choice in the high-toned, sophisticated atmosphere of European eroticism -- Buñuel's Belle de Jour being the obvious point of comparison -- and then to collapse the "cinematic" fantasy by bringing Isabelle back down to earth. This doesn't work, in part because Ozon lacks the control and the commitment.

[Vacth's] performance deepens as the film progresses, however, even as she continues playing it close to the chest. Isabelle's later interactions with her well-meaning stepfather and with a normal, nice-guy boyfriend slowly begin to hint at a deep pathology that never threatens to efface the character's humanity; it's remarkably assured and subtle work, worthy of comparison to Catherine Deneuve's brilliantly blank turn in Buñuel's film.

As reactions to budding sexuality go, it's a little extreme. And it's also contrived; Isabelle's decision never makes any emotional, let alone logical, sense... Vacth, like the movie, is beautiful and resolutely humorless. There's a lovely scene with a series of teens reciting a poem by Arthur Rimbaud; the catch is that these kids seem better company than Isabelle.

As with many films by the prolific Ozon (In the House), there's an ephemeral quality to Young & Beautiful that makes it seem as if it were evaporating as you watch it. Many scenes play out with little resonance, fully formed on the surface—the "Summer" section has the lazy-days glow and melancholy of Eric Rohmer's great Pauline at the Beach (1983)—but half-baked in toto.

Though the filmmaker's flair for the bombastic and macabre remains, with Young and Beautiful he channels that energy into a quiet, earthbound story that grows stranger and sneakier as it progresses.

Ozon starts with a panting-voyeur POV shot zooming in on Isabelle's bikini-clad body and ends with her gazing at her own mirror reflection, though the character is too ultimately slight a mysterious object to withstand such Belle de jour scrutiny. Charlotte Rampling as a widow with provocative regrets is a glad sight, even if all her brief turn amounts to little more than a recitation of Ozon's dubious thesis on the oldest profession.

Ozon's penchant for restricted chronologies—the three-month prognosis in Time to Leave (2005), the rewound affair in 5×2 (2004)—serves him well given the threshold his lead is standing on, and the haunted Françoise Hardy songs about girlhood on the soundtrack earnestly punctuate Isabelle's seasonal progression through the year. It's only when Charlotte Rampling shows up as a former client's spouse that the seams start to show...

The picture is reasonably compelling, particularly in the way Ozon outlines the tender relationship between Isabelle and one of her much older clients. And it's more restrained than many of Ozon's pictures—there's no exhausting campiness here. But Young & Beautiful might have worked better without its throat-clearing preamble, which sets up a facile, and possibly unintentional, cause-and-effect conundrum

The problem is that the base material never feels more than polite and, on occasion, a little academic, and it's flippant attitude to what it's actually about... ends up making it appear slight and, frankly, a little shallow. The situations, too, are all very clipped and to-the-point, and while they all do work in cosy dramatic unison, there's never the sense that we're being offered any new, exciting or challenging insights on the world's oldest profession.

The bad news continued on Thursday with the staggeringly obtuse "Young & Beautiful," from the reliably unreliable French director François Ozon... [Isabelle's] first time isn't just a dissociative bummer, though; it also leads her to become — mon dieu! — a prostitute, a decision that Mr. Ozon treats as an ordinary, actually banal stage in her developmental life.

It's to Ozon's credit that he never serves up easy answers, and even after ample scenes of sex and showdowns with those closest to Isabelle, and even a scene with a psychologist, we're none the wiser as to what's driving her... But this welcome openness is contradicted by other decisions that Ozon makes. The film's four-season structure – we move from summer to spring – is suffocating and squeezes complex ideas into an over-simple framework.