Young & Beautiful (2013)

If a film can hold its subject at arm's length while undressing it, François Ozon's Young and Beautiful manages the trick with a jeweler's composure. Isabelle, seventeen and adrift, loses her virginity to a German boy on a summer holiday, finds the experience hollow, and returns to Paris to quietly open for business under the name Léa. The camera watches. It does not scold and it does not celebrate. Charlotte Rampling drifts in near the close as the widow of a client who expired mid-encounter, and the final scene between the two women carries more warmth than anything that came before it.

The film concerns a young woman's sexual self-possession, which invites the expectation of a statement. What arrives instead is a mood. Peter Bradshaw, no reactionary, called it a very male fantasy, the polite European way of saying the camera enjoys what it claims to study. There is agency here, chilly and unresolved. There is no argument bolted to it, no thesis, no program. The movie watches a girl treat intimacy as a transaction and refuses to lecture about either.

The usual apparatus of contemporary social concern is absent. Race is not a subject. Neither is class grievance, though money does change hands and the trade is rendered as a student side hustle. The therapist appears for one scene and offers no sermon. Isabelle's mother slaps her, apologizes, grounds her, and the film lets the mess stand. What we get is a portrait, cool and slightly cruel, of a girl the movie declines to diagnose. It is elegant, unsettling, and entirely without a message, which in this climate feels like its own quiet provocation.