Young and Beautiful

Francois Ozon's Young and Beautiful echoes Luis Bunuel's 1967 classic Belle de Jour in some obvious ways -- both are studies of disaffected members of the French bourgeois who turn to prostitution in an effort to feel something (anything).

But while Bunuel's film stars Catherine Deneuve as a respectable housewife who secretly works afternoons in a swank Parisian brothel, Isabelle (newcomer Marine Vacth) is a precocious child who turns to freelancing after losing her virginity in a thuddingly unoriginal summer way on the eve of her 17th birthday to an obliging, clueless, slightly older German boy.

We'll follow Isabelle, a cool and remote creature, through the next year.