REVIEW - JEUNE & JOLIE

Francois Ozon needs to learn how to edit, and not within the context of each of his films. He needs to learn how to edit his ideas, and determine which are worthy of development into full-length features, and which are not worthy of such time, energy and money. Jeune & Jolie possesses a narrative, a range of themes and a style that would barely suffice for a brief vignette in an expansive anthology film, or the most trifling of subplots in a television soap opera. His study of an attractive teenage girl discovering what capabilities her newly active sexuality has imbued her with is not only cliched in its basic form, it unfurls into a thoroughly cliched string of thoroughly expected events, each of whose supposed emotional resonance, both within the narrative and within the audience's consciousness, is negated by our preparedness for it. Ozon naturally, instinctively signposts every movement, and succumbs to tradition and expectation with all of these movements, as if to satisfy an urge. His protagonist, Isabelle, would surely know that the teasing of such satisfaction, and the eventual denial of it, is often more potent than the satisfaction itself. His tasteful approach undercuts the dynamic sexuality that radiates from lead Marine Vacth, though the film's most memorable scenes are its least ostentatious, often comprising a mere sequence of exchanges between Isabelle and her younger brother. Charlotte Rampling makes a silly cameo near the end, in just one of Ozon's many quasi-meta touches, with... cor, that must be a wig. That can't be her real hair. That's the ugliest wig I've seen in all my life.