Review of Fat Girl (2001) by James C — 23 Nov 2007

Devastating portrait of heterosexuality in a mess. A holiday romance between an beautiful virgin and a bland seducer is anatomised to show every twist and turn of the manipulations involved when a boy tries to get his dick inside a Romantically-inclined girl. The relationship begs many questions, not least why heterosexual sex needs to be conducted under the cloud of subterfuge. All of this is witnessed by the girl's overweight younger sister, a heretic against society's body fascism who carries not just excess body fat but a cynicism about men and relationships which belies her age to a frightening degree.

The long central sex scene in the sisters' shared bedroom is painful and authentic, with a morbid humour. The adults in the film - a workaholic bourgeois father, his neurotic wife and the blowzy Italian mama of the boy who indulges in over-dramatic posturing, suggest that the troubled teens have little but hypocrisy and pathology to look forwards to in adulthood.

At the end of the film, something truly shocking and horrible happens, after a long and hair-raising driving sequence as terrifying as anything in Duel. The ending is contentious and a deliberate non-sequitur. It seems to be suggesting that the truth about male/female sexuality is a murderous fury from the male end combined with a retreat into self-protective emotional catatonia in the female. A film which has been a social comedy-drama turns into a transgressive fantasy, and the effect leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth, not least because some of the possible readings involve the younger girl both willing and needing the event to happen in order to liberate her from the prison of her family and the oppressive beauty of her sister.