The film opens with a woman swimming topless in a secluded turquoise-colored beach somewhere in the French Riviera. She is Sofia, a 22-year-old curvaceous woman whom medium close-up serves as the background when the film title appears, An Easy Girl, her sun-kissed skin wet, her breasts left bare. Yet we then follow the film through Sofia’s 16-year-old cousin Naïma’s eyes, a high-school girl living with her single mother. Sofia comes to visit and decides that she is going to be staying with them for a while. She doesn’t seem to have any job, and spends her days leisurely at home reading magazines and sprawls onto the streets and night clubs of Cannes at night. She’s not interested in love, she tells her naïve teenage cousin, no, she wants adventures.
When Sofia catches the eyes of art dealer Andres (played by Portuguese actor Nuno Lopes), she is invited to board a yacht he currently resides in with his broker, Philippe. This is the start of one of Sofia’s adventures and Naïma blindly follows the cousin she idolizes so much. Though always looking out of place, Naïma observes and breathes everything in, even abandoning her best friend Dodo, who doesn’t seem to agree with Sofia’s sashaying way of life. Naïma watches her cousin closely, at one time she even follows the private sounds coming from a room where Sofia and Andres are having sex, and watches, somewhere between shocked and captivated. If this is the lifestyle she wants, Naïma has got a lot to learn.
Sofia’s outlook on life seems so captivating, so free, that Naïma cannot help but be bewitched. Sofia seems to be fully aware of what she is, how to use her desirability for her advantage so well that she looks robotic. Cast as Sofia is Zahia Dehar, who was involved in a scandal back in 2009 when she was paid for sex by players from the French national football team – she was underage. Like Sofia, Dehar used this tabloid attention to her advantage and managed to start a career for herself as a model and a lingerie designer.
We tend to judge that a woman with Sofia’s looks, with numerous ‘enhanced’ body parts that seem too much for her age, cannot have any substance inside their head. Yet Sofia (and Dehar) knows exactly how to leverage the spotlight put on her. When a rich, elegant older hostess tries to patronize her in one of the scenes, she holds her own, not just with words, but by taking off her clothes and flaunting her young assets, as if saying, ‘I win.’ Yet is Sofia happy? Is she really free? When Naïma’s worried mother sees how her daughter is so hypnotized by Sofia, she says, “Freedom is sometimes a lot work too.”
The film is not subtle on its commentary on social class. Naïma and Sofia are working class descendants of immigrants and Sofia’s adventures allow Naïma to learn how it feels to be on the other side. How it feels to dine in the restaurant that she’s planning to intern at, how to suntan on a yacht so ubiquitous in Cannes, her hometown, yet so foreign to her. There is an incident towards the end that puts the nail on the coffin – they are reminded that they belong to a different class than these yacht people and Naïma, being a lot less experienced than her cousin, needs a lot more time processing this. But at least there is Philippe, whose warmth and level headedness make this coming-of-age experience enriching and eye-opening for Naïma, rather than traumatizing.
She speaks movies. 