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The Criterion Collection: Fat Girl Blu-ray Disc Review

Fat Girl: The Criterion Collection [Blu-ray] (2001)

FAT GIRL (2001, Blu-ray released May 3, 2011 – MSRP $39.95)

MOVIE: ★★★★☆ 
VIDEO: ★★★★½ 
AUDIO: ★★★★½ 
EXTRAS: ★★★☆☆ 
BLU-RAY: ★★★★☆ 


I challenge you to watch Catherine Breillat‘s very real, very visceral Fat Girl and not feel something. This is a powerful film making a powerful, extremely good looking high-def debut on Blu-ray, thanks to the efforts of The Criterion Collection.

    Twelve-year-old Anaïs is fat. Her sister, fifteen-year-old Elena, is a beauty. While the girls are on vacation with their parents, Anaïs tags along while Elena explores the dreary seaside town. Elena meets Fernando, an Italian law student; he seduces her with promises of love, and the ever watchful Anaïs bears witness to the corruption of her sister’s innocence. Fat Girl (À ma soeur!) is not only a portrayal of female adolescent sexuality and the complicated bond between siblings but also a shocking assertion by the always controversial Catherine Breillat (Romance, The Last Mistress) that violent oppression exists at the core of male-female relations.

Fat Girl is a tough film for me to talk about. It’s such an honest, compelling look at the struggles of young romance and family dynamics that I can’t help but love it (I’m a sucker for sincerity and naturalism in films). But the ending! My god, that ending!! It just drives me bonkers!! I feel in so many ways that the film is nearly perfect up to that point and then it just goes off the damn rails. I mean, I understand what Breillat was after, using a dramatization of a news event that was sweeping the nation at the time (I’m speaking about it in general terms to not spoil the ending for you) to comment on abusive familial and male/female relations. It’s a worthy concept. My issue with it is that it changes the tone of the film so drastically as to make it feel exploitative. I don’t hate the ending. I just dislike how it colours the rest of the film.

Criterion’s new Blu-ray edition of Fat Girl looks phenomenal! This upgrade from their previously issued DVD exhibits far more detail, richer colours and a more dimensional, textured image that makes it absolutely worth trading up to. It’s far from perfect though, with evidence of edge enhancement present if your eye is trained to notice such things, but there’s nothing here that will distract from an otherwise all-around improved effort.

From the liner notes:

    This high-definition digital transfer was created on a Spirit Datacine from a 35mm interpositive. Thousands of instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices, warps, jitter, and flicker were manually removed using MTI’s DRS system and Pixel Farm’s PFClean system, while Digital Vision’s DVNR system was used for small dirt, grain, and noise reduction.

The DTS-HD Master 5.1 audio track offers greater fidelity and depth than the compressed track on the DVD. Dialogue, which accounts for most of the sound on the track, is clean and clear, with limited surround activity present.

From the liner notes:

    The surround soundtrack was remastered at 24-bit from the original 6-track digital audio master. Clicks, thumps, hiss, and hum were manually removed using Pro Tools HD. Crackle was attenuated using AudioCube’s integrated workstation.

Bonus features are carried over in whole from the DVD, including a couple of significant interviews with director Breillat and a nice, if brief, collection of behind the scenes footage. The extras, excellent as they might be, are very few, relative to Criterion’s usual efforts. It would have been nice to see a more significant doc on the making of the film or to have a feature length commentary to walk us through Breillat’s process but the special features provided will do just fine.

Special Features:

  • High-definition digital restoration with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
  • Behind-the-scenes footage from the making of Fat Girl
  • Two interviews with director Catherine Breillat, one conducted the night after the film’s world premiere at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival, the other a look back at the film’s production and alternate ending
  • French and U.S. theatrical trailers
  • Plus: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau, a 2001 interview with Breillat, and a piece by Breillat on the title

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