Rebecca Zlotowski’s Une fille facile (An Easy Girl) opens with a contradiction. A quotation from 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal on the importance of finding a profession (“The most important thing in life is choosing a profession. Chance holds the key”) is inscribed over a modern day sun-drenched beach, where a lone woman treads water in a bikini. This play with contradictions sets up Zlotowski’s latest film, whose simple premise – a breezy coming-of-age story set between two young women in the Côte d’Azur – it later unseats.
Naïma (Mina Farid) has just turned sixteen and is spending the summer at her modest family home in Cannes, where her family works at a local upscale hotel. She usually helps out there during the summer but is now reluctant. She’d rather spend her time with her school friends, relaxing on the beach by day and partying by night. When her older cousin Sofia (Zahia Dehar) shows up out of the blue to live with them, Naïma becomes envious of her new roommate’s glamour and sophistication in the way that only a 16-year-old gazing at a woman in her early twenties could. Sofia, a Bardot-like figure who attracts the attention of men everywhere she goes, begins an affair with Andrès (Nuno Lopes) an older man who has stopped off in Cannes in his luxury yacht. Naïma, naive and excited, tags along with her cousin and begins to see how the other side – or rather, the 1% – lives.
Zlotowski began work on Une fille facile after a chance encounter with Zahia Dehar, who plays Sofia. Dehar, an Algerian-French businesswoman and model, had become a tabloid sensation in France in 2010 after being caught up in a high-end, underage escort scandal involving France’s national football team. At only 18, she became the unwitting face of a national scandal, a symbol of our culture’s predilection for praising femininity only to revile it at its most extreme (not unlike the Kardashians or Instagram models today). In the tabloid press, she was given the nickname la scandaleuse – the scandalous woman. She then became Karl Lagerfeld’s muse and an entrepreneur and designer with her own lingerie line. Dehar’s dual status in the public eye as both Madonna and whore, someone whom people either loved or hated or, more often, loved to hate, intrigued Zlotowski. It seemed to her that Dehar was not regarded as a person unto herself, but rather as a site of debate as to how a woman should be. The fact that women are commonly rewarded for their beauty above all else does not cohere with the qualities society tells us to value: hard work, modesty, niceness. Women like Dehar’s Sofia expose the gulf between well-meaning rhetoric and the world as it is. They are almost always spoken of in highly contradictory terms: at once powerful and extremely trivial; very young but apparently mature enough to be sexualised. This incoherency betrays the fact that we’re still not sure what we want these public figures to say, besides acting as passive sites of public adoration and hatred.
Une fille facile presents the cliché of the beautiful, untroubled woman of leisure in order to deconstruct it, and show how misdirected this ‘hatred’ really is. Dehar’s Sofia is a woman careful to maintain her mystique, choosing to suppress her inner life and chase adventure. She doesn’t speak much at dinner parties and abstains from revealing too much about her personal life. Naïma is surprised when she finds Sofia visibly exhausted on her apartment’s small balcony, grieving the recent death of her mother (something she never revisits). At first glance, Sofia’s life looks easy. Naïma joins her as she goes in and out of designer stores with Andrès’s credit card, and wines and dines with his wealthy friends. In this idyll, it’s unsurprising that class tensions simmer. Staff on the yacht lingers quietly judge the girls; Andrès’s friends either ignore or deride Sofia; at an art collector’s mansion, Andrès and his friends enjoy a spirited conversation on whether a ‘wealthy anarchist’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s not lost on the viewers that both Naïma and Sofia are two Maghrebi girls in Cannes, taken for a ride exclusively by white Europeans. “Do you think Sofia is free?” asks Naïma’s mother sceptically, when she sees her daughter retreating from her old friends in pursuit of her cousin’s flashy life. Sofia’s only has limited power in her current life, and she knows this. Beauty fades, as does a young woman’s ability to endear herself to perennially bored playboys.
Women like Sofia, noted Rebecca Zlotowski in a post-screening Q&A, are so often seen but not heard. “I still do not know what Kate Moss’s speaking voice sounds like,” she explained. For these feminine icons of pop culture, hypervisibility comes at the expense of fully rounded personhood. When we look at Sofia, we’re not looking at a person but our own sublimated fears of what a woman can be and do. It may be more interesting to ask not at whom we always find ourselves looking, but who is doing this looking. Une fille facile is just as much an excavation of the emptiness of a cliché as it is a meta-commentary on the unequal hypocrisies that sustain it: “I wanted to ask who the real exhibitionists in our society are,” Zlotowski elaborated. “Is it a woman in a thong, as we often think, or playboys like Andrès?”
Rebecca Liu is digital assistant at Prospect and one of Another Gaze’s staff writers.
If you like what you read, please consider donating to us.
