Young & Beautiful

An unflinching look at the sexuality of a 17-year-old girl. She may have grown up too fast for my taste, but let's face it, who among us didn't experiment in some way when we were her age? The plot twist in the middle of the story, caused by the sudden death of Isabella's client during coitus, snapped me out of my lethargy and I started to watch the film much more closely, which lasted until the very end. I appreciate that François Ozon doesn't try to moralize and leaves it purely up to the viewer to judge how to deal with not only Isabelle's somewhat promiscuous behavior. (24/04/2020)

My beloved François Ozon has delighted me once again and hit my melancholic mood perfectly, because Young & Beautiful is a film absolutely shrouded in melancholy and brooding. That's why he yet again could choose no other for the background music but Francoise Hardy and her intimate songs. Many of the scenes would have worked well as paintings capturing the ephemeral beauty of the moment. Marine Vacth is really beautiful and her character exactly confirms the well-known and trite saying that beautiful women don't have it as easy in life as everyone around them thinks. (15/08/2015)

An innocent teasing of the audience with a theme that never gets old. François Ozon understands women, and likes them better than Lars von Trier. That’s why he could shoot this film, which is all about the feelings of a seventeen-year-old girl drunk on her first encounters with adult matters. A seventeen-year-old that was curious about the men who would order the services of her body, about what it would be like with them in the darkened hotel rooms or on the leather backseats of their cars. To use the words of Charlotte Rampling, any girl with enough courage would have tried it. Not lack of self-esteem, but enough courage… The only emotional scene of the film is the fight with the weeping mother: “You broke my heart!” (09/12/2013)

François Ozon can direct, there's no doubt about that, but I can't help feeling that despite the interesting theme, once again, it seems like it wasn't fully mastered. The film is quite enjoyable to watch; you can see that the creators have developed characters well. However, I also had the feeling that it was cold and detached and that the sex with those older guys still felt kind of glossy. (01/08/2017)

A plan that you either endorse or... Or not. The heroine/tramp who looks like a clone of Julia Roberts, only years younger, remains impenetrable, as far as her motives are concerned, for the entire picture, so it’s up to the viewer what they think of her. She is a mirror that says more about you than about her. Theoretically at least, if you play Ozon’s game. I played Ozon’s game, but didn’t finish it, because in the end it is less refined than I expected from him and it comes across more intentionally superficial than natural. (20/01/2014)