The film begins with an unknown observer surreptitiously
watching the titular young beauty Isabelle (Marine Vacth). On a beachside, she
undresses to sunbathe. Director Francois Ozon uses the voyeurism to undercut
the potential pleasure of the moment. We are seeing a nude body, but there is also
something perverse and sinister due to the framing of the moment. We become
self-conscious of our act of viewing.
Throughout the film, there are many scenes where men will
look upon Isabelle, but the power dynamic of the situations are consistently
complicated by the way Ozon films these scenes. Ozon is constantly showing
Isabelle returning the gaze of the males who wish to possess her, and, in turn,
returning the gaze of us, the viewer.
After a brief introductory sequence where Isabelle awkwardly
loses her virginity to a German hunk (a situation which he controls and
Isabelle is largely a passive participant in), the film spends most of its time
to showing Isabelle’s involvement as a call girl. Ozon never explains where
this desire stems from. Isabelle actions, instead, become ever more curious.
She doesn’t seem to derive a whole lot of pleasure out of her encounters. Vacth
portrays Isabelle with a tantalizingly blank expression (shades of Catherine
Denueve in Belle de Jour).
The pleasure that Isabelle gains seems to be in the power
the sexual acts provide her. The money seems to give her little interest and
the sex is often icky and degrading. But Isabelle enjoys the power over men
this gives her (though she probably couldn’t quite ascertain and pinpoint this
herself). She is in control. She is desired. She commands the
“to-be-looked-at-ness” of her.
Ozon plays to the to-be-looked-at-ness of his protagonist.
Isabelle is well aware of her beauty. People note it with some frequency. She
knows that people desire her and that this is an asset. The film starts with a
shot where Isabelle has no control over the way she is looked at and it slowly
moves towards her dominating the way she is viewed both within the narrative
and by the camera.
In the traditional analysis of the male gaze, the act of
gazing was given acceptance because the men we do the vicarious gazing through
were nice people, heroes. The majority of the gazers in Young & Beautiful, Isabelle’s clients, are the antithesis of the expected male gazers. They are old and
not especially good-looking. They also are not charming or charismatic
individuals. Put simply, they are casual assholes. They treat Isabelle crudely
and misogynistically. They are dismissive and rude. We can’t identify with
them, and our identification aligns ever more closely with Isabelle.
Our awareness of our place as spectator causes us to judge
the behavior of these men more harshly. We become more cognizant of the way
these men objectify and sexualize Isabelle; and the way this sexism extends to
more normal, traditional realms of Isabelle’s life.
Midway through the film, Isabelle’s call girl activities are
discovered. A client dies, and the police inform her family. Suddenly, everyone
in Isabelle’s life is deeply self-aware and self-conscious of the power of
Isabelle. They are hyper-mindful of the capacities of her young ingénue
appearance. Soon every encounter with a male in her life becomes a charged
moments, potentially freighted with meaning, read into or otherwise.
There is a fair amount of meta-textual-ness taking place
throughout the film. The film’s chief narrative pull comes from attempting to
comprehend the enigmatic motives of Isabelle. But Ozon underlays this with a
significant degree of subtext about the way we watch films. In a way, we are
just as possessive of Isabelle as her clients. We are drawn to her beauty and
possibly even desire her. It’s acceptable though, right? It’s solely within the
context of a film. However, Ozon keeps challenging that notion by making the
act of viewing a fraught experience with complicated responses to the actions
on display.
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