Young & Beautiful

The step from a teenage girl’s “first time” to her adoption of the world’s oldest profession proves a very short one in François Ozon’s latest. Isabelle (Marine Vacth) turns 17 during a summer spent at the beach, where a handsome young German provides a testing ground for her ability to attract the opposite sex. Back in Paris that fall, she puts that skill to commercial uses with precocious ease—something at baffling odds with her solidly bourgeois home life. Like Catherine Deneuve in Belle du Jour, Isabelle has no real financial need, making her motivation cryptic. Is Isabelle acting out some psychological need born from her father’s absence? She’d scoff at so banal a suggestion. But then her emotions seem off-limits to everyone—perhaps even herself. A significant midpoint crisis scarcely troubles her, even as it rattles everyone else. A portrait in “four seasons and four songs,” Young & Beautiful maintains the poker-faced attention to detail of its writer-director’s smaller character studies (Hideaway, Under the Skin) while adding a bit of his suspense films’ (Swimming Pool, In the House) coldblooded intrigue. Fittingly, its last scenes require a veteran from both: Charlotte Rampling, who brings customary authority to a part that takes Young & Beautiful‘s story and heroine to a surprising new level of understanding. –Dennis Harvey