“NNNNN” (Cameron Bailey, NOW). Breillat’s first international success as a filmmaker, 36 fillette is a landmark work that radically redefined the coming-of-age genre. Brooding and feisty fourteen-year-old Lili (Delphine Zentout, dubbed the French Lolita by critics) is a typical teenager: bored with life, mad at the world, exasperated by her family and undergoing hormone-crazed puberty. She’s bursting out of her 36 fillette–sized clothes, and decides to exploit this for attention and control during a family vacation in a French resort town. With boobs crammed into a black bustier, Lily sets out to experience her “400 coups,” and is given a pep talk by none other than Jean-Pierre Léaud (note the final freeze frame) before she targets Maurice (Étienne Chicot), a forty-year-old classic roué, whom she decides to seduce. As in Fat Girl, a third of the film is given over to a seduction scene, as Lili waffles between her mounting desire and her debilitating fear and shame—the complicated fits and starts of a tease. The film’s courageous and taboo-defying portrayal has been praised by feminists, especially for its subversion of the male gaze and for its “deromanticization of virginity and its loss.” (Susan Hayward). “36 fillette rings so true that to watch it is like eavesdropping on life” (Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times).