Imagine a world in which an uncertain 16-year old girl can sleep with a different boy every night without being coerced or humiliated or having her feelings hurt deeply or getting a disease or becoming pregnant. Well – that world is Quebec – at least according to writer Catherine Leger and director Sophie Lorain whose Charlotte a du Fun, known in English as Slut in a Good Way, is streaming on Amazon Prime. This 2018 sex-positive hetero teen romp is shot in black and white and that’s the least of reasons for why it seems so out of step with the current US zeitgeist. The film is a surprising disputation of the prevailing fraught attitudes about sex in the post Aids Me-Too era and I can only assume this is its raison d’etre. Or maybe it’s just a Quebecois thing.
The action centers around three best girl friends who get jobs at a toy store during the holiday rush – more as a means of meeting the hot guys working there than of making money. The girls are a refreshingly motley crew. They look and act like real teens as they drink beer, smoke pot and talk shit while hanging out in the local park. Early in the film Charlotte learns that her long-time boyfriend is gay and this sets the ball rolling. She’s vulnerable to the charms of the toy store boys who are all confident flirts and winds up sleeping with each one of them. Realizing she’s ceded too much power and with inspiration from Maria Callas who she’s discovered on YouTube, she leads the girls in a sex strike (which doubles as a charity fund drive) in order to teach the boys a lesson and put things in balance. Once the hook-ups stop, the boys and girls can to see each other for who they really are and are better able to pair off satisfactorily.
While the film takes teen sexuality seriously – particularly the double standard by which boys and girls are judged for promiscuity – and Charlotte has to do some significant soul-searching in managing the fallout of her exploits – it’s all ultimately in good fun and things never get too nasty. The film is almost disorientingly good-natured considering how rancorous sexual relations have become in the Trump era. It’s not for nothing that the film is set in a toy store. The characters are all still kids and they like to play. There’s not an adult to be found to put a damper on their fun or hinder them in working things out on their own – which is a nice contrast to the film’s American analogues – like Cock Blockers with its meddlesome buffoonish grown-ups. Charlotte a du Fun is low budget and hardly cinematic but long on charm with snappy dialogue and a fresh perspective on teen sex and romance. I’ll take Quebec over Hollywood despite the cold.
FrenchCinema 