Bijou claims she asked to see the dailies and was refused. Maybe she shouldn't have expected more from a Larry Clark movie. 'I'm sitting there doing a scene and they're shooting down my crotch.' 'What the fuck is that bullshit? That's not OK,' she says, angrily. At one point, for no apparent reason, we get a lingering shot up an ill-fitting pair of hotpants to Bijou's half-naked crotch. Shots constantly linger on her and her co-star Rachel Miner's bodies. She doesn't feel she should even be doing press for it. In fact, it's an acting feat she's pulled off twice before: once as a hiphop-obsessed teen in James Toback's film about racism, Black and White, and then as a groupie in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous.Ĭlark may have cast Bijou for her acting talent, but he was also clearly aware of the notoriety she'd bring to the part.īijou doesn't like Bully much. Her portrayal of a sexually overconfident yet obviously fragile teenager is electrifying - even if it's dangerously close to type. His breakthrough was 1995's titillating Kids, about a bunch of skateboarders who competed to deflower as many girls as they could.īijou Phillips's performance is one of Bully 's undoubted highlights. That it's so ugly is not particularly surprising it's directed by Larry Clark, whose attention-grabbing trademark has been the portrayal of nihilistic, oversexualised teenagers set adrift by parents who just don't understand them. It's a bleak, violent picture, peopled by aimless youths who understand sex, drugs and arcade games, but not much else. Bully is based on the true story of the murder of Bobby Kent, killed on 14 July 1993 in a well-off south Florida suburb by a group of nicely brought-up teens whom he had hung around for years. But like any 21-year-old, she detests being reminded of what she was like when she was a teenager.Īll this would be beside the point, only Bijou's latest movie, Bully, is about what happens when American teenagers find themselves too far out of their emotional depth. Feet tucked under her, she is as jaded as any middle-aged rock star, but with the fragile self-confidence of any post-adolescent. She sits on a sofa in a photographer's studio, two parts nerves to one part feistiness, dressed in a pink shirt and brown mock-sheepskin jacket. 'If you were 14 years old and able to live on your own in an apartment in New York City, and you got invited to all these clubs, and you got a bank account and you had a car service you could call so that you could go wherever you wanted. Her father sent her into rehab, a process he knew a little about.Īt 21, an older, wiser, soberer Bijou Phillips looks jumpy the moment the subject of her teenage indiscretions are raised. At 17 she fell apart after her friend - the 20-year-old Manhattan socialite Davide Sorrenti - died after overdosing on heroin. She grew up on the pages of America's tabloids, where readers lapped up stories of her precocious misbehaviour: how she ended an affair with Cher's son Elijah Blue by throwing his belongings out of the window how she allegedly tried to French kiss one girl interviewer how she half-sliced a man's finger off with a cigar-cutter in New York's Spy Bar. She flashed her breasts to photographers on what seemed like a regular basis, and at 15 lost her virginity to the famously drug-bingeing singer Evan Dando. She drank and took drugs - anything from coke and ecstasy up to heroin. Then, at 14, she quit school, left home and moved into her own apartment just off Fifth Avenue - with her own housekeeper. She was one of the bored, pouty adolescents showing white underwear in a Calvin Klein campaign that was widely condemned as eerily paedophilic. Bijou began to make a name for herself at 13, initially as a model.
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