Early on we can clearly see that despite being in a woman's body, this character is still a girl, as she fights like a kid with her brother. She's only 14 and seems eager to lose her virginity, but has both a repugnance for the people around her and a sense of vulnerability when she puts herself in compromising situations, like the hotel room of a middle-aged man. She flirts and teases to test her power over men but is mixed up about what to do with it once she has it, and I guess it's this liminal period in a girl's life that Breillat is exploring (apparently somewhat autobiographically).
Meanwhile men old enough to be her father (and a woman as well) look at her as fresh prey, making this a pretty creepy story. Her own brother tells a guy in a bar that "She's a juicy pear. Ripe for picking." Ugh. As the film involves repeated encounters between the girl (16 year old Delphine Zentout) and the middle aged guy (39 year old Étienne Chicot) which lead to nudity and sex acts that are as awkward for the characters as they are for the audience, it was a tough one for me to like. It wasn't always clear Breillat wasn't capitalizing on the salacious concept either, and when I read she didn't even know Zentout's age when she cast her and was lucky she had just turned 16 days before shooting started, it made me wonder about her approach to this.
On the positive side there is a degree of empowerment in the girl's character, as she's able to tell the middle-aged guy "no" even after he's been massaging her to arousal, and the next day tells him acerbically "Next time you need to ejaculate, I'm not a sink!" Her father beats her for staying out all night and being a "little sl*t," to which she screams "It's my life, not yours!" When she ultimately decides to lose her virginity to an intellectual boy who likes reading Dostoevsky and Camus, she commands him during the (brief) act to "Stop dribbling on me! What are you waiting for! Go on!" Even though this seems like such a sad group of characters all around (too sad for me, really), there is strength in the girl's smile at the end, and some belief that she'll navigate her way into adulthood on her own terms.
For me what the film could have used more of was the little scene with Jean-Pierre Leaud, who says these lines so skillfully: "We think we're in a rut, but we aren't. The world's a huge place. It's a giant box spring mattress. You bounce on it and land somewhere else. You think you're in a rut, that the world will cave in on you, but it's not true. Just land in a different place."
