That was an excellent one.

It is a performances centric movie

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

What I learned from this film . . . . and the other films of this Director! Words like Provocative, Controversial, Shocking when used to describe a film usually mean a film has already been made that deals with the subject that has more taste, cleverness, attention to narrative believability and character development than the Provocative Controversial and Shocking one.Provocative, Controversial, and Shocking filmmakers can get people to watch their films by being Provocative, Controversial, and Shocking over and over again on basically the same theme.Girls (at least in France) will start French kissing you in a public cafe within the first 2 minutes of meeting you in front of your sister if you are from Italy, cute and have limited command of French but can amazingly have 30 minute intimate conversations and then mentally rape you with their limited command of French.Teenagers (at least in France and parts of Italy) think about sex 24 hours a day and have no other interests that would make them fully rounded human beings worth really caring about and when they actually are intimate show no compassion tenderness or enjoyment of eroticism because men always mentally rape girls and girls are really dense.Mental Rape consists of being - conned into having Anal sex(because it's not real sex)by someone who doesn't really speak your language well- with your sister in the room. Going down on your boyfriend the next day without him even asking because you're "confused" and don't realize you've been mentally raped, but you go down on him anyway because???. Having sex on the beach, again with the sister nearby, having sex at night again with the sister in the room. Telling the girl you really love her and want to see her again and then still not really knowing you've been mentally raped because mental rape means you don't realize you're being mentally raped.Wondering if %100 percent of civilization has been missing out by not having their sister in the room while having passionless sex.There can be really cool scenes on highways that build up and then go nowhere.Serial Killers can blunder out of Nowhere smash your window without your Mother waking up, kill your Sister, rip your mothers clothes and fondle her for no apparent reason before killing her and then not kill you but rape you and make you eat your own underwear but letting you live so there will be a cool freeze frame at the end that is Provocative Controversial and Shocking.It is OK and not outrageously hypocritical for a Director seeking the "truth" to lie to a 13 year old actress by telling them their dog just died to get a performance out of them.It is OK (in France at least) to have a 13 year old perform a brutal explicit rape scene and gag on her own underwear as its stuffed into her mouth and have it not considered pornographic but artistic because its the "truth" - by way of a dead dog that's not really dead.It is OK to mock people even liberals! because they find a 13 year old performing a brutal explicit rape scene and gag on her own underwear as its stuffed into her mouth as pornographic and not enlightened.It is OK to have a 13 year old perform a brutal explicit rape scene and gag on her own underwear as its stuffed into her mouth but not to actually see the finished film because they are not old enough.There are some people who don't understand why the above is painfully ironic and will mock you for mentioning it and call you "Moral" and "you must be an American" These same people are Enlightened.Enlightenment in the 21st century is more of a catch phrase people use when they can't explain why someone is not "Getting It" and are too busy "texting to explain further. It is not the same as Enlightenment in the age that nobody cares about anymore because it happened along time ago and they don't bother to teach it in school because they would have to cut the budget on the new Football field to pay for the classes.It is OK and not outrageously hypocritical for a Director seeking the "truth" about the degrading aspects of sex on women as dealt by men to hire a notorious porn star who has dunked womens heads into toilets while having anal sex to act in your film because he has a big weenie.It is OK and not outrageously hypocritical to say professional seasoned actors are all mediocre and conformists because they are too smart to agree to be in your films.It is OK and not outrageously hypocritical to say professional seasoned actors are all mediocre and conformists because they don't look good nude or have small weenies.Saying "All true artists are hated" is only %50 true. It won't make you an artist but it will get you hated.It is OK for a filmmaker to have a grossly unhealthy, childishly obsessive and ugly view of human sexuality without offering any juxtaposition, contrast or thematic development of this limited theme and pass it off as Provocative, Controversial, Shocking and "truthful" over and over again while using manipulation, hypocritical views, methods and a serious lack of narrative common sense, instead of seeking some kind of therapy so they will stop making the same movies on the same subject the rest of their lives.

I adore Catherine Breillat. Her films really get at the core of the war (and it's a war) between men and women. Gone is any trace of silliness and sentimentality. This film, Fat Girl (aka For My Sister) was the first film of hers I saw, and it's still a favorite. The film centers around 2 sisters, one seductive and one slovenly and fat, yet the fat one seems to know what's going on better than her (at least physically) more attractive sister. The scenes where an Italian suitor tries to seduce the attractive sister are difficult to watch, because they have so much truth in them. Many people dislike Breillat's film intensely, usually American critics. Mind you, the critics of Breillat's films aren't the usual, religious fundamentalists. They are usually "educated", liberal critics who are supposed to be open minded, but seems to shut down their minds when reviewing Breillat's films. They take scenes out of context (like right wing fundies do when they criticise films they don't like), and start attacking Breillat herself, instead of looking at her work. She's been compared to the Marquis de Sade, not in terms of S/M sex, but in the tone of her work regarding relationships (many people have never read de Sade. His work is about much more than bondage). Watching interviews with her is as fascinating as her films. Her films are very bleak and cynical, yet there is more truth in one frame of Fat Girl (and Breillat's other work) than in an entire season of Sex and the City (I would have loved to see her as "special guest director" on Sex and the City. It would have been the best episode), or many American films that are pretending to be "edgy" about sex, but in fact end up being childish. Many people dislike the ending of this film, saying it doesn't fit in with the rest of the movie. The ending fits in perfectly with the tone of the film (and of the character it most affects). I think the ending is so unique that many people just can't accept it. This (along with Anatomy of Hell) are amongst the best of her films. To have a filmmaker as perceptive as her in this day and age is something we should all be grateful for. See Sex is Comedy as well. It's a companion piece to this film. Brilliant Breillat.

I have just seen "A Ma Soeur", and all I can say is it's a pretentious piece if garbage. What is it about French film directors that makes critics and film buffs alike salivate at the mouth when discussing what are , essentially, in the main, arrogant, self-indulgent works of pseudo-intellectual nonsense? You can throw Pedro Almoldovar into that category as well. He is yet another European "auteur" whose films grate to the point where I want to throw a brick at the screen. All of this solipsistic home-spun philosophizing gimmickry is nothing more than a case of the "Emperor's New Clothes".In the case of "A Ma Soeur", the denouement is totally incongruous and non-sequitir with the rest of the film; completely out of sync with the main corpus of the piece. For the most part, we are watching a sleazy Italian student attempting to deflower an attractive teenage girl while her younger overweight sister looks on. This, in itself evoked a sense of "ennui" in me. For the gratuitous sake of sensationalism, a few controversial love scenes are added to the mix, but hey, this IS a French film, so it is all for the sake of "Art" and "Artistic Endeavour" The ending is so ridiculous and over the top that it bears no resemblance to the themes and motifs of the rest of the film. If a Hollywood director made a piece of garbage like this, he would have been rightly lambasted but, because this is a French film, it is regarded by the pseudo-intellectual cognoscenti as "challenging" and "uncompromising".The denouement reminded me of those excellent films, "The Player" and "Adaptation", where Altman and Kaufman/Jonze respectively take the unmerciful p**s out of overblown, sensationalist Hollywood films, which start out in one direction but take a completely different route for the sake of increased cinema audiences and publicity; except "A Ma Soeur" continued to take itself seriously right up to the silly unbelievable,ridiculous ending.

Breillat is superb at filming endless debates on sex beds in the guise of human sexual 'profundity'. You won't be denied your dose of excess if you see this typical piece of Breillat pretentiousness. One sex scene on a bed between the two young lovers goes on for almost 30 minutes! And after this nonsense, you're only slightly more familiar with what the characters are about (we already know what they're about anyway; this 'plot' is not very difficult to understand).If these were Bergmanesque or Rohmeresque glacier-like sex scenes (i.e. if they illuminated the 'study' of the characters or propelled the narrative) I could forgive writer/director Breillat. But she does the opposite. This is the fourth of her films that I've seen (I kept thinking I'd missed something brilliant). I'm now fully convinced that she's a flat-out sensationalist voyeur, and commits the deadly sin of being deliberately controversial. In my opinion, she does this because her talent is, well, limited.Breillat's films are loaded with dialogue, which is a shame because she simply doesn't have very much to say. She paints all of her films around sex, and that becomes a pretty flimsy canvas very quickly.