This movie is in French and I couldn’t understand a word of it, but luckily it’s told mostly in pictures. And what pretty pictures! The main actress spends maybe half the running time in the nude, which is of course something we can all enjoy. Still, all this body exposure is there for a reason. It visualizes, in the most graphic terms possible, the film’s main themes: image obsession and its ugly offshoot, bulimia.
Most of the movie takes place in the girl’s lonely apartment. At first, I though the shot of her typing on her Mac looked like a product placement for Apple, but there’s more to it than that. Like American Beauty, it invites you to look closer. Laptops and the Internet are actually two key tools that have helped spread the epidemic of bulimia at an alarming rate over the last decade. So fitting this into the film’s mise en scène is quite important.
The girl seems trapped in the first half of the film, until she ventures out and goes to the market. A good-looking guy in the checkout line is undressing her with his eyes, and that’s enough: suddenly her life starts to turn around for the better. I think that’s fairly believable. Sometimes a single look from a single person’s eye is enough give your life new purpose and meaning.
How this relationship is resolved is a little off-putting at first. I was expecting something a little more romantic than rough s*x in an alleyway, then I remembered that’s the way these things often develop in real life. Movies have conditioned to expect big speeches and dates when they’re often nonexistent in the real world. The ending of Peanuts is as happy as it could be, because it shows the girl eating.
