'FAT GIRL' HEAVY ON THE HEARTBREAK.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

So I'm watching this French film ``Fat Girl'' and thinking, for the longest time: Wow. The director, Catherine Breillat, who also wrote the script, has really improved since her last movie, that endurance test of sexual hysteria, ``Romance.''

Not that ``Fat Girl'' doesn't demand a different kind of endurance from audiences. It's a voyeuristically unforgiving, just-shy-of-explicit examination of a 15-year-old nymphet's sexual initiation, as interpreted through the eyes and ears of her overweight 12-year-old sister. Breillat romanticizes nothing - indeed, much of the heartbreak here stems from the older, sophisticated-until-the-moment-of-truth Elena's delusion that a summer vacation fling with an Italian college boy might be true love - but she and her young actresses display an unerring sense of behavioral truth from frame one.

I'm also recalling that, before she substituted porn shots for any semblance of emotional perspective in ``Romance,'' Breillat made another very good, carnal coming-of-age story, ``36 Fillette.'' Maybe she just understands adolescent sexuality better than the adult version she so mishandled the last time out.

And then I get to the last five minutes of ``Fat Girl.'' It's a gratuitously violent ending that comes so far out of nowhere, you can only imagine one of three excuses for it (and none of them good ones). Either Breillat simply couldn't figure out where her movie needed to go (unlikely, even though most of the last act is essentially a long, tense drive with an angry mom down what appears to be an endless highway); or she somehow has decided that her artistic signature requires strong doses of shocking sensationalism in every movie, whether they belong there or not; or, most probably as well as ludicrously, she's suggesting that all male predation operates on a reductive scale on which there is little space between seductive youthful dissembling, marital indifference and sheer monstrosity.

Suggesting, as some critics have, that any of this might just be the fearsome projections of an adolescent girl's hormonal imagination makes it all seem even more exploitative.

As you may have inferred by now, the ending kind of ruined the film for me. Yet this astounding misstep cannot erase the insightful and courageous work that comes before it. I say, if the basic material interests you, by all means go and appreciate it; just leave about the fourth time the family vehicle passes a threatening semi-truck.

``You reek of loose morals!'' chubby Anais (Anais Reboux) lectures her pretty pop-tart sister Elena (Roxane Mesquida) as they argue along the path from the family vacation compound to a beachside cafe. There they meet Fernando (Libero De Rienzo), whom Elena almost instantly starts making out with while Anais watches from behind the hills of her banana split.

When Fernando worms his way into the girls' bedroom a few nights later, the real observation begins. For all her flirtatiousness, Elena is a virgin, and the negotiations that wear on between her and Fernando sound so true, so steeped in the devastating crosscurrents of desire, hesitation and mutual manipulation, that the unblinking exposure of young, naked flesh quickly becomes a very secondary consideration. What we (and Anais, who's supposed to be sleeping on the other side of the room) are eavesdropping on is infinitely more intriguing - and a bigger violation of the tenderest privacy - than watching two awkward kids trying to move like they know what they're doing.

The relationship between the sisters is just as authentically observed; their emotional bond has the supportive, tensile strength of a million strands, despite their constant bickering and unerasable resentments. At one point they discuss how they don't resemble one another at all, but they're sisters all right.

The Canadian actress Arsinee Khanjian plays their easily angered mother, and while she shrilly overreacts to certain events, you can believe she's hauled quite a handful for the past dozen years.

``FAT GIRL''

(Not rated: violence, nudity, sex, language, children in jeopardy)

The stars: Anais Reboux, Roxane Mesquida, Libero De Rienzo, Arsinee Khanjian.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Catherine Breillat. Released by Cowboy Booking International.

Running time: One hour, 23 minutes.

Playing: Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Westside Pavilion, West L.A.

Our rating: Two and one half stars

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Anais Reboux portrays a chubby 12-year-old who painfully observes her flirtatious older sister's burgeoning sexuality in ``Fat Girl.''