diametrically opposed type. Kaplan has
described the film as the story of “a witch who
doesn’t let herself be burned; she sets fire to the
others.” A gypsy, Marie begins the film as an
isolated maid to a cruel mistress, groped and
degraded at every turn. When her mother is hit
by a car and left for dead on the road and her
beloved goat is murdered, she takes up residence
in her mother’s remote shed. Soon Marie has
transformed her new home into a one-woman
whorehouse/pagan temple/collaged art project.
Unlike Cookie, she doesn’t need a complicated
con; she is simply beautiful and willing to accept
money for sex. Just about every man in the village takes the bait.
There is no moralizing or sentimentalizing her chosen
profession—it’s a customer service job and she performs the
minimum level of physical and emotional labor to get through
each transaction. The men try to control her rates, shame her,
rape her without payment, but she remains ice-cold, buying a
tape recorder and using the pillow-talk confessions of her despised
johns to get her revenge. Marie absorbs it all, registering their
physical and psychological abuse with the same cool detachment
as she does their foolishness. She barely conceals her disgust, but
the men never notice the hatred behind her eyes. It may be difficult
to discern from this description, but A Very Curious Girlis a
comedy—a brutal one. Kaplan allows the humorous spectacle of
overconfident men to exist alongside their violence.L
ike so many of kaplan’s works, a very curious girl
is a deeply unerotic film about sex. Neither a scold nor a
sensationalist, Kaplan made films where the majority of
sex ranges from buffoonish to indifferent, often with
partners playing at different ends of the spectrum. It’s
one of many ways Kaplan complicates classification. Her
clearest influence is Luis Buñuel, a fellow surrealist and satirist of
bourgeois absurdity. Her movies borrow some of the trappings of
pre-Code madcap comedies, but only if the Gold Diggers ended
up robbing their men and burning the theater to the ground. An
individualist to the core, she celebrated her ability to alienate and
disrupt, writing: “Films made by women should be interesting,
even disturbing, to everyone... Poetesses, to your broomsticks!
For an androgynous creation, sweet or bitter but violent!” She’s
known for her interest in eroticism, but her films stymie titillation.
She was a Parisian critic turned director in the ’60s, with a deep
antipathy for her New Wave brethren. She is a Francophone
woman director coming to prominence concurrently with Chantal
Akerman, Marguerite Duras, and Agnès Varda—and rejecting
feminism. Her films were heralded for their radicalism, but she
worked in mainstream generic forms.
Kaplan’s Emmanuelle adaptation Néa (A Young Emmanuelle)
(1976) brought these tensions into stark relief and was met with a
cruel critical reception and an indifferent public one. The film
follows the softcore beats of its cinematic universe, but undermines
them at every turn. Ann Zacharias play Sibylle, a precocious high-
school student who gets caught shoplifting erotic fiction from Axel,
a local bookseller/publisher, played with appropriately off-putting
smarm by Sami Frey. Young Sibylle is not merely a smut consumer;
she’s also an aspiring author, conducting extensive research in her
family home. She’s created a room of her own, like Marie’s shed,
where she pens imagined sexual escapades, often externalized by her
doting cat, Cumes. At first, the obligatory sex scenes are shot from
Sibylle’s studious gaze: she swoops up Cumes, dons her horn-
rimmed glasses, and watches her mother and aunt get it on throughan open window (along with an earlier
masturbation scene, it’s one of the few warm,
sensual depictions of sex in Kaplan’s body of
work). Sibylle’s investigation is often clinical,
at one point inviting a hopeful teen suitor
that she calls “Zits” into her writing sanctuary
to have his genitals probed with a pen and
inspected with a magnifying glass.
Axel takes an interest in Sibylle, reading her
pages and contracting her into a shady, secret
arrangement where he’ll publish her novel
under an assumed name. Sibylle begins taking
her boat, L’Atalante, to his nearby chateau to
spy on his rendezvous. A typical easily flattered Kaplan man, Axel
attributes the verisimilitude of Sibylle’s prose to uncanny insight
rather than simple voyeurism. She enlists Axel to consummate her
erotic interest, and these scenes, central to the conventions of the
genre, are hard to stomach. Zacharias was 19 when the film was
shot, but reads even younger than the character’s 16. Supposedly on
a school trip for the weekend, Sibylle shows up on Axel’s doorstep
costumed much younger than we’ve seen her thus far, a glint in her
eye belying the deliberateness of the choice. Kaplan continues to
frustrate the eroticism of the interlude, at one point having Sibylle
take a clandestine trip into a closed area of Axel’s home, only to find
a room preserved Manderlay-style in memory of his dead mother.
Like A Very Curious Girl’s Marie, Sibylle has an unwavering sense
of self, a quality far beyond her years, but Kaplan never allows the
viewer to lose sight of the fact that she is still a child. Fortified by her
now firsthand sexual knowledge, Sibylle finishes her book, which
Axel publishes to great acclaim. Excluded from her own success and
largely powerless against Axel’s increasingly self-aggrandizing
machinations, Sibylle is returned to her teen existence: forbidden
from reading her own writing, under the thumb of her tyrannical
father, and naïvely true to her promise to avoid Axel until their
forbidden love can be revealed. She gets her revenge by elaborately
framing Axel for rape, adding yet another layer of discomfort to a
thoroughly disquieting film. Néaends as many of Kaplan’s films
do, with our protagonist scorching the earth and heading toward
the horizon, but the ending is uncharacteristically downbeat.
Sibylle’s adult counterparts are permitted to leave as free women,
with their vengeance satisfied. Sibylle leaves beaten and bound to
a repulsive, pathetic Axel.
“Néawas a flop. Mustn’t be paranoid, but I think it was in
revenge for [A Very Curious Girl], a kick in the pants. It’s a free
movie and that doesn’t please men. The reviews were ugly: Néa
Néant[‘Nea Nothing’],” Kaplan said. Néais certainly something,
but the “Néa Néant” barb is telling. Kaplan’s films are full of
small-scale female utopias, where the vanities of the patriarchy
are patently absurd and adherence to a rotten society’s rules makes56 | FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019©^LOBSTERNelly Kaplan’s known
for her interest in
eroticism, but her films
stymie titillation. Herfilms were (^) heralded
for their radicality, but
she worked in main-
stream generic forms.
A Very
Curious Girl