All True Artists Are Hated: The Transgressions of Catherine Breillat
Screening Dates
  • July 15 (Monday) 6:30
  • July 20 (Saturday) 8:50
New Restoration

36 fillette rings so true that to watch it is like eavesdropping on life … So fresh and incisive, so poignant yet funny, that its coming-of-age story unfolds as if it were the first of its kind.”

Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

After a nine-year absence from the director’s chair, Catherine Breillat returned with 36 fillette, having lost none of her power to push both boundaries and buttons. Delphine Zentout plays Lili, a precocious 14-year-old girl on a seaside family vacation. Drawn to a bitter middle-aged man (Étienne Chicot), Lili longs to lose her virginity and initiates a contest of wills in which she discovers herself more mature than, but still rattled by the equivocations of, her chauvinistic counterpart. Fueled by an extraordinary performance by then-16-year-old Zentout, and featuring a scene-stealing Jean-Pierre Léaud as Lili’s brief confidant, 36 fillette showcases Breillat as an incisive chronicler of the subtle evolutions of teenage desire. —Janus Films

In French with English subtitles

“[An] acrid little gem … A curiously touching portrait, consciously leavened with the same compassionate candor that Truffaut brought to portrayals of his own youth.”

Kurt Jacobsen, Chicago Reader

A bleak film, but it is also limned with sufficient sadness and dry humour to make its bitter pill worth swallowing.”

Lee Hill, Senses of Cinema
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