Catherine Breillat intends all of her films to be provocations. With Fat Girl, she certainly achieved her goal. Shortly before Fat Girl was to start its Toronto theatrical run in Nov. 2001, the Ontario Film Review Board refused to pass it. The board objected to explicit scenes depicting sexual relations between a 15-year-old girl and an adult man. Together with the film's North American distributor, Cowboy Pictures, Breillat refused to cut the scenes and a standoff ensued, much to the embarrassment of the province's film community.

The fact that Fat Girl was "banned in Ontario" became a marketing hook elsewhere in Canada and the U.S., where audiences were free to discover the movie for what it was: not a seamy porno, but a frank and disturbing story about two adolescent sisters -- the thin and comely 15-year-old Elena (Roxane Mesquida) and the hefty and wary 12-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) -- who are sexually initiated into an adult world of coercion and deceit.

When I interviewed Breillat at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival, where Fat Girl played without incident, she described the subject of the film as "la trahison de discours amoureux" -- the betrayal of the discourse of love by those who are willing to lie to get what they want. "Even when we are adults," says Breillat, "when you hear the marvellous words of love and eternity, you believe it, even if it's stupid. Either you believe in it or you are cynical."

Alas, the censors were less concerned about words of love than pictures of fornication. The OFRB's decision stoked tremendous curiosity about Fat Girl locally. Despite the ban, it's long been surreptitiously available for rent at several video stores. In Sept. 2002, the TIFF included Breillat's latest feature, Sex Is Comedy, which stars Anne Parillaud as a highly Breillat-esque director shooting a film that looks very much like Fat Girl. It even features Mesquida on the receiving end of another seduction.

Fat Girl has not been forgotten by its director or the audience that was denied the right to see it. Last month, the OFRB adopted new guidelines that allowed them to assess the film as a whole. The board's new head Bill Moody -- who replaced the more scissor-happy Robert Warren last year -- recently told the Toronto Star that the previously objectionable scenes were now "artistic and integral to the plot" and not "prurient or exploitative." Fat Girl was passed without cuts, which means that Toronto filmgoers will finally be able to see it and proudly leave the cinema feeling... wickedly depressed.

While this is a demanding film, the volatile bond between the sisters does give Fat Girl a more humane tone than Breillat's other films about the tumultuous end of virginity, 36 Fillette and Une vraie jeune fille. (It's also not nearly as absurd as Breillat's less ambiguously pornographic Romance.) Breillat says a different dynamic developed in Fat Girl "because I had to put my hurt and my point of view on two persons. So it's really a soul with two bodies -- it has both this antagonism and this marvellous complicity. The two sisters have a world to themselves -- that gives them power but at the same time it's a sort of isolation and they have to leave that world to become adults. So it's cruel but at the same time there's a tenderness."

Fat Girl's most controversial sections are two seduction scenes in which Elena gradually submits to the will of an older Italian law student. As Anaïs twitches pathetically on the other side of the room, the student tries to convince her sister that anal intercourse is a noble "demonstration of love."

Yet Breillat doesn't regard Elena as an innocent in this exchange. "She obliges him because she wants him to be guilty," she says. "She doesn't want to have to say to herself that she wanted in fact to have sexual relations with him. She doesn't want the responsibility so she obliges him to lie. I think he likes her but evidently he does not love her so much."

Yet more outrageous is the film's shocking conclusion, which may anger even the director's most passionate defenders. Breillat asks that viewers not take it too literally. "This is also a fairy tale," she says, more than a little disingenuously, "and as a fairy tale, it has a symbolic end."

As the director insists, love is a crucial part of her now-infamous "fairy tale." "Everybody has a desperate hope of the romantic fiction of love, non?" she says, laughing. "It's like when Edith Piaf married a very, very young man just a few years before her death, and she sang, 'A quoi ça sert l'amour' with him. I think that love is always a new thing, even when you are very, very, very cynical and very old and you know that it is impossible. But what is impossible, you want even more. You cannot be Cartesian. If you want to be just rationalist and 'normal,' then you don't live life."