A Real Young Girl () is a 1976 French drama film about a 14-year-old girl's sexual awakening, written and directed by Catherine Breillat. The film, Catherine Breillat's first, was based on her fourth novel, Le Soupirail. This film is notable for its graphic depiction of sex scenes, which include Charlotte Alexandra exposing her breasts and vulva and the male actors displaying their penises. This led to the film being banned in many countries, and it was not released to theatres until 2000. Plot Alice Bonnard is a 14-year-old girl attending a boarding school in France who comes back to her home in the Landes forest for the summer of 1963. She flashes back to her time at school, where she frequently masturbated out of boredom; in one scene, she inserts a spoon into her vagina. Her father hires a young man named Jim, with whom Alice immediately becomes infatuated. Alice has a graphic sexual fantasy in which Jim ties her to the ground with barbed wire and attempts to insert an earthworm into her vagina. When the earthworm will not fit, Jim tears it into small pieces and puts them in Alice's pubic hair. At a carnival, a middle-aged man exposes himself to her on a ride. She then arrives home and imagines seeing her father's penis. She exposes herself to Jim, and the two masturbate in front of each other, to Alice's chagrin. She discovers her father is having an affair, and Jim tries pressuring her into having sex. He is then shot and killed by a trap that Alice's father set up to keep wild boar out of his maize field. Production This film has no closing credits; instead, an instrumental version of the song "Suis-je une petite fille" (Am I a little girl) plays over a black screen. Though playing a 14-year-old, Charlotte Alexandra was 21 years old in real-life at the time of the film's production. Reception On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes the film has a score of 71% based on reviews from 7 critics, with an average rating of 6.8/10. Critic Brian Price calls A Real Young Girl a "transgressive look at the sexual awakening of an adolescent girl", an "awkward film" which "represents Breillat at her most Bataillesque, freely mingling abstract images of female genitalia, mud, and rodents into this otherwise realist account of a young girl's" coming of age. Price argued that