A young, 17 year old woman (Isabelle, played by Marine Vacth) loses her virginity while on a family summer vacation and within six months is working in Paris as a high-class call prostitute in this relentlessly vacuous and bourgeois tale from François Ozon.
Similar, in a way, to another recent French film, Elles, Jeune Et Jolie presents prostitution as a straightforward work choice for young women, with few if any meaningful consequences. This, as an artistic and storytelling choice feels at best, voyeuristic and dishonest and at worst, downright morally bankrupt.
Ozon makes no pretence to linear storytelling. We follow Isabelle across four seasons of one year and from scene to scene often with little story to connect the moments and experiences portrayed on screen. She sees several clients, all significantly older, with the odd moment of humiliation, but most interactions looking like safe, soft porn cliches.
In the end, we have no real understanding of who she is or what motivates her. Vacth seems to be a capable young actor and perhaps the emptiness in her performance is a metaphor for what Ozon sees the passionless void of a generation whose notions of sex have been predetermined by the porn industry.
It’s a question which, like so much in this film is suggested, but never fully addressed. Jeune Et Jolie feels like a disinterested conversation about teenage prostitution rather than the kind of film this subject matter deserves, which of course, would have been something far less comfortable indeed.
