Young & Beautiful

François Ozon's Jeune et jolie premiered in the main competition at the 66th Cannes Film Festival in May 2013, where it competed for the Palme d'Or in an edition eventually won by Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Colour. It was Ozon's third film to play in Cannes competition, after Swimming Pool (2003) and Time to Leave (2005), and confirmed his recurring interest in female protagonists whose interior lives resist explanation.

The film traces one year in the life of Isabelle, a quiet Parisian seventeen-year-old played by the previously little-known model Marine Vacth, structured across four seasons, each opened by a song from Françoise Hardy's late-1960s catalogue. The opening summer chapter on the Côte d'Azur (the family's holiday cottage, the German tourist, the first encounter) is followed by autumn in Paris, where Isabelle begins meeting older men through a website. Géraldine Pailhas plays her mother and Frédéric Pierrot her stepfather. Charlotte Rampling, in a single late scene that consciously echoes her earlier collaboration with Ozon on Swimming Pool, plays one of Isabelle's clients' widows.

Critical response was substantial and divided. Cahiers du cinéma placed the film high in their year-end ranking; English-language critics were more reserved. The consensus settled on Marine Vacth, whose central performance, almost entirely interior, was widely regarded as one of the most striking French debuts of the decade. Vacth went on to win the Lumières Award for Most Promising Actress and to anchor Ozon's The Double Lover in 2017.