In the fresh and perceptive coming of age film An Easy Girl, it’s summertime in Cannes, and local working class girl Naima (Mina Farid) has just turned 16, with an internship lined up in a hotel kitchen. But first, her 22-year-old Parisian cousin Sofia (Zahia Dehar) comes for a week’s visit. Sofia catches the eyes of two much older guys, Andres (Nuno Lopes) and Philippe (Benoît Magimel), and the girls are invited to party on Andres’ massive yacht.
Sofia lives her life for “adventure and sensation”, and works her stunning looks so she can rely on the kindness of strangers. She doesn’t even carry cash, putting everything on the tabs of male admirers.
Naima is no shrinking violet and no prude, but she has NO IDEA about the extravagance and carnality of Eurotrash hedonism. The audience may cringe at the plopping of Naima’s comparative innocence onto a zillionaire’s party yacht with her enthusiastically decadent cousin. We’re expecting that Naima may be victimized, corrupted, or have a sexual awakening,
But here’s what is so fresh about An Easy Girl – thanks to the female director and co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski, the UNEXPECTED happens. Naima learns more about life and human behavior than she did at school or would in her internship.
As Jeanette Catsoulis points out in the NYT review, the French title can mean “An Easy Girl” or “A Simple Girl”.
Sofia, fully committed to the most shallow of lifestyles, is decidedly not the ideal role model. But she turns out to be a canny observer of people and passes along some invaluable tips about how to handle social situations.
Most unexpected, however, is what Naima learns from Philippe. At first, he seems to only be Andres’ diffident wing man. But Philippe has reflected on his own life, and his lessons to Naima about her own self-worth are indelible.
It’s a superb performance by Benoît Magimel (The Piano Teacher, The Flower of Evil). Flashy roles get the awards buzz, but Magimel’s understated interpretation of the still-waters-run-deep Philippe is masterful.
Because the story is all from Naima’s point of view, Mina Farid is on-screen in every scene, and she’s exceptional. Nuno Lopes (the one good thing about the epic snorefest Lines of Wellington) is fine as Andres.
Zahia Dehar is perfectly cast for Sofia, perhaps shockingly so. In real life, Dehar is famous in France for parlaying her national notoriety as a teen prostitute to the rich and famous into her own fashion line. Her lips and figure are like a caricature of Brigitte Bardot’s.
This is a remarkably genuine and non-exploitative coming of age story. An Easy Girl is a NYT Critic’s Pick and it is streaming on Netflix.