Controversy has always followed French provocateur Catherine Breillat (Romance), but, in the spirit of her sexually adventurous heroines, she's spent her entire career leading it on. When she agreed to adapt her first feature, 1975's A Real Young Girl, from a novel (The Air Duct) about a 14-year-old's self-discovery, the producers expected gauzy, exploitative softcore that would be vindicated by a female perspective. In a way, Breillat gave them exactly what they wanted, an explicit and erotically charged one-hot-summer scenario starring the voluptuous Charlotte Alexandra, who would later appear in the third Emmanuelle film. But Breillat's discomfiting frankness about the shame, violence, and decidedly unladylike experimentation that are part of her heroine's coming-of-age so disturbed the producers that the film was never released. Twenty-five years later, timed in perfect anticipation of Fat Girl (another unsettling study of adolescence), A Real Young Girl finally made its debut in Paris theaters, quietly ducking the controversy that was rained on the post-feminist hardcore of Baise-Moi. A crude, revealing sketch of the themes and attitudes that would resurface in her later work, the film takes a matter-of-fact approach to teen sexuality that's bold and uncompromising, far from any cheesecloth titillation for the trenchcoat crowd. But Breillat's usual shortcomings are also laid bare at this early stage, including a tendency toward silly provocation, hateful peripheral characters, and a heroine alter ego who speaks in arch theory instead of common language. Loose and episodic, with frequent excursions into fantasy, the story takes place during Alexandra's summer vacation at her parents' home in the French countryside in the late '60s. Bored by her repressed mother (Rita Maiden) and lecherous father (Bruno Balp), both grotesque relics of a more conservative era, Alexandra spends her endless days coming to terms with her newly developed body. When she's not throwing scandalous looks at the lean young stud (Hiram Keller) at her father's sawmill, she spends a lot of time fiddling with bodily fluids and looking for things (a spoon, an ink pen, a bottle of tanning lotion) to cram in her vagina. Her experiments are often accompanied by a voiceover loaded with daffy Breillatisms, like when she vomits on her pajamas and savors its "liberating warmth." At its best, A Real Young Girl deals honestly with the uncertainties of an awkward transition, when girls are thrust into womanhood without knowing quite how to handle it. Breillat gets inside Alexandra's head almost too well, viewing the world outside of it with a juvenile's listlessness and contempt. Following its heroine's lead, there are discoveries to be made in A Real Young Girl, but getting there means pawing through a lot of muck.