Fat Girl - The Wolf at the Truck Stop

Despite all of my hang-ups about Fat Girl, there is a scene in the movie that is absolutely brilliant. When the girls and their mother pull into the truck stop to rest, Elena says that she needs to use the bathroom. As an audience member, I'm already panicking. Fat Girl is a horror movie, no doubt about it. But like the great Hitchcock said, "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." Breillat goes that extra mile by making the bang horrific too, which is the rape of Anais, but her build up is masterful. Breillat primes our fears with the location of the truck stop, no doubt playing off the cultural implications that a truck stop is the next worst thing a woman can be in after an unmarked van with tinted windows.

Next, she adds bait. Elena says she needs to use the bathroom. She gets out of the car alone, her own mother doesn't even look up from her nap and Anais stays behind. The audience wants to shout, "Why are you going alone?! or What happened to the buddy system?!" because not only is Elena in a seedy location, to begin with, but now she's going to a second more isolated location. This lets the audience's imagination go wild about what horrible things might be happening to Elena off-screen while Breillat keeps the camera inside the car.

Then there's the herring, which is my favorite part of the scene. The herring comes in the form of a truck driver in an 18-wheeler driving past the family's car in the parking lot. The moment is shot wonderfully as the camera takes Anais' POV and she looks out the window and accidentally makes eye-contact with the driver. Breillat is hardly subtle. The Driver is a grizzled middle-aged man with hula-hoop girls on his dashboard while suggestive silhouettes of women decorate the side of his truck. The height of the 18-wheeler makes him look intimidating as he literally stares down at Anais. The truck itself is a loud beast compared to the family's tiny car as if to imply that only he can control it. The Driver ultimately drives off-screen to park somewhere that's not even in the camera's field of view, emphasizing how big this truck stop must be.

At this point, the audience fears the worst. If men like the Driver occupy this truck stop, then what kind of monsters are terrorizing poor Elena in the bathroom. The cherry on top is emphasized by Anais' face as soon as the Driver is gone. She furrows her brow as if to suggest that she realizes how vulnerable her family (a group of women) is, along with a tang of guilt that she let her sister go off by herself.

Breillat doesn't keep Anais and the audience in suspense for long as Anais looks at the window again...to see her sister perfectly fine walking back from the bathroom to the car. The audience breathes a sigh of relief and maybe thinks our fears were overreacting.  Breillat lulls the audience again into a sense of false security, where the girls have a heartwarming talk about being there for each other when they have to face their father and then get ready for sleep. The audience feels like they dodged a bullet.

Only for Breillat to smack us with a baseball bat in the form Anais' Rapist. Everything after him breaking the windshield is part of the proverbial "bang."