The Madonna-Whore-Victim Complex: Fat Girl and Piggy

With Catherine Breillat’s next film, Last Summer (L'Été dernier), due to be released this September, I wanted to return to her 2001 feminist gem, Fat Girl (A Ma Sœur). Fat Girl had a profound effect on me when I first watched it. As part of the French New Extremity movement and the body horror pantheon, it has scenes of graphic sexual violence, but this cinema niche provoked vital discussions about the body and sexuality. More recently, too, Carlota Martínez-Pereda’s 2022 body-image horror, Piggy, offers an insight into how the sexuality of fat female bodies is warped to extremes to control them, but also into how to evade such control.

Both films show how fat women’s bodies are both oversexualised and de-sexualised. In Piggy, the insults thrown at the lead character Sara throughout the film, from her female classmates and men hanging out on the street, oscillate between her being too repulsive to be attractive and suggestions at her promiscuity. She’s accosted at the pool, where bullies tease her for having a boyfriend who she must have seduced with pork, laughing that she has ‘finally’ scored. They say that her body ‘eats’ her bikini and steal her clothes. The forced exposure takes her sexuality out of her control. Constantly compared to a pig, she’s denied agency and subjectivity, and teased for being both overtly sexual and sexually undesirable. 

In Fat Girl, Anais’s sister also compares her to a pig – ‘Elle guzzles like a sow’ – tying the insult specifically to femininity. Elena describes Anais as ‘pigheaded’, and doesn’t believe she can pick up even a decent boy because she’s a ‘fat slob’. 

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In Piggy, the romantic tension between Sara and the kidnapper of her bullies is built through the touching close-up scenes between them, revealing each’s desire. After the man witnesses the bullies insult and almost drown Sara at the public swimming pool, he abducts them. However, while he also buys her favourite sweet treat after the shopkeeper shames Sara for them, he merely represents another form of control over her. He ignores her desire to leave the slaughterhouse in the final scenes. Here, Pereda’s engagement with the final girl trope, as coined by Carol J. Clover, is interesting because Sara diverges from the conventional figure: virginal, doesn’t have vices, uses a phallic weapon. Sara, however, masturbates, ‘over’ eats (as judged by the town), and kills the abductor by biting his neck out. The film’s formal deviance echoes Sara’s rejection of bodily control. 

If we look at the protagonists of both films through the triple lens of the virgin-whore-victim complex, we see how they offer alternative, feminist realities. Fat Girl lays out these three positions, as the two sisters discuss what virginity means in the opening scene. And in Fat Girl, when Elena is discovered to have been sexual with Fernando, her mother tells her she’ll have to be ‘inspected’ by a doctor as if she’s ill. 

Yet, while Elena hopes to lose her virginity to a man who’ll marry her, Anaïs declares that ‘the first time should be with nobody’ because she doesn’t want ‘a guy bragging he had [her] first’, refuting the ‘virgin’ concept. After Anaïs is forced upon by a man, she tells the police adamantly that she wasn’t raped. She refuses to be a virgin or a victim, and in doing so refuses to participate in the patriarchal demarcation of a woman’s selfhood. 

Sara, too, rejects being a victim. Pereda toys with Sara becoming an accomplice to the kidnapper twice – first, as he abducts the girls, and Sara doesn’t tell anybody about witnessing this act, and the second, as he hands her a gun to kill the bullies. Here, though, she avoids the pattern of the victim to perpetrator trajectory and releases them instead. 

“If we look at the protagonists of both films through the triple lens of the virgin-whore-victim complex, we see how they offer alternative, feminist realities.”

Both films convincingly show the protagonists reclaim their bodies, thus rejecting the patriarchal gaze, through making themselves the objects of their own desire. The use of colour in both films accomplishes this.

Pink is clearly the colour theme in Piggy, but the shade differences are key. Sara’s favourite cake icing and wrapper is fuchsia, as is her stuffed toy. Fuchsia is bold and warm, and the cinematography creates an inviting aura in her bedroom where she eats the cake for comfort. The medium-wide shot with deep focus accentuates the central deep colour of Sara, wrapped in the fuchsia towel, with the pink treat, creating a safe atmosphere. Additionally, she uses the toy to masturbate, and in the flashbacks to the encounter with the abductor it’s only pink light illuminating their faces, while in the original scene the lights from the fireworks are blue too. 

In Fat Girl, the colour used to establish Anais as her own object of desire is yellow. While Elena flirts with her lothario, Fernando, Anais orders and eats a banana split, her favourite dessert. This motif is repeated when she lays herself upon a yellow towel and applies a whipped-cream-like sun lotion onto her body. By turning herself into her favourite dessert, she becomes her own object of desire. The colourisation of the film is overall quite dreary, yet the shot of Anais above the turquoise pool, in a lime-green swimming costume, with the yellow towel and white whipped cream, is the most radiant in the film. Previously, Anais engages in a fantasy with the steps of the pool and the jetty, wrapping her legs around and kissing each one. In the fantasy, she dips between them, and she has power over the two ‘lovers’. In another scene, dressed in an extravagant thick yellow dressing gown, she piles her plate high with food, impervious to the criticism she receives. We see how yellow affords Anais comfort and luxury, and she’s all the more dazzling for it. 

These films are both difficult and illuminating experiences. They trace how attempts are made to control fat, femme bodies through bullying and sex-shaming. Yet they both offer resolutions, in highlighting moments where protagonists’ become their own objects of desire, silencing the patriarchal gaze and making them icons for agency and desire. 

Words: Lizzy Yarwood