“It’s not a film about prostitution, it’s a film about adolescence,” says François Ozon. The prolific French filmmaker is talking about Young & Beautiful, his 14th film in 15 years, which stars Marine Vacth as a 17-year-old taking up a covert after-school career as high-class call-girl. “There is violence in all adolescence,” says Ozon, who, at a dapper 46, still almost looks boyish. “Adolescence is a dangerous period, because you want to experiment with many things, but you have no sense of that danger. And for her this is not dangerous, and it’s secret, and it’s so easy. People are afraid to say it, but if you are a beautiful 17-year-old girl, it’s so easy to do this on the internet; that’s just the reality.”
After coming up with the premise for the picture, Ozon spent endless hours talking to police, case workers, and psychoanalysts about the rise of these cases, and how the internet is central to them. Whilst critics have compared it to nouvelle-vague classics like Belle du Jour and Vivre Sa Vie, Ozon’s film is less about degradation (“as one psychoanalyst said to me: ‘sometimes, when you’re a beautiful girl, you can just have the compulsion to be sullied’”) and more a portrait of consumerist society.
“She is not poor, she doesn’t need this money, and she doesn’t even use it,” says Ozon. “But young people are obsessed with money. In this economic society, you have to pay all the time, everything is a commodity, so young people want to know what their own price is. Even if it means making themselves an object.”
Young & Beautiful has stirred debate by refusing to moralise on its story, or even provide explicit motivation for its main character. “People always want to ask me why, but I don’t know why, it’s just something she feels like she has to do,” says Vacth. On screen, she plays a cold, awkward teen, but off she’s warm, 22, and pregnant. “It could’ve been something else: like drugs, or anorexia, or suicide. There are things that you just have to do, and sometimes these things can be violent, or self-destructive, or not easily understandable, but there’s nothing extraordinary about it.”
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Vacth, first met Ozon about the role in 2011; the same year, as model, she’d become the French face of Yves Saint Laurent, and made her screen debut in Cédric Klapisch’s My Part Of The Pie. She was still new to acting, and was anxious about undertaking a role in which she would be in nearly every scene, with so many of them being sex scenes. “I had doubts that I’d be capable of doing it,” Vacth admits. “But once I had spoken to François, understood that the story was not salacious, that the nudity wasn’t voyeurism, then I had trust in him, and knew I could do this.”
Ozon has often worked with young actors experiencing sexual awakenings, especially in his short films and early features. “It’s as much of a pleasure to work with young actors, like Marine, as with Catherine Deneuve or Fabrice Luchini,” Ozon says. “Because it’s all new to them. They are not conscious of themselves. There’s a real richness there. And I am like a thief: stealing their beauty, their innocence, their perversity, too.”
Young & Beautiful in cinemas 1 May
