Pretty Baby
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DVD Cover Information Actor: Antonio Fargas, Brooke Shields, Frances Faye, Keith Carradine, Susan Sarandon Director: Louis Malle Brand: Paramount Cinematographer: Sven Nykvist Producer: Louis Malle Writer: Louis Malle Editor: Suzanne Fenn Producer: Polly Platt Writer: Polly Platt DVD: Region Code 1 Audio: English (Original Language) Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen Picture Format: 1.85:1 Running Time: 110 minutes DVD Release Date: 2003-11-18 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Studio: Paramount |
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Movie Reviews of Pretty Baby
Movie Review: Only Louis Malle could have made this film
Summary: 5 Stars
Brooke Shields is as gorgeous as a little girl can be. Her beauty really rivets you to the screen. Louis Malle keeps the camera on her as often and for as long as possible, reminding me that some years ago Brooke Shields was the most photographed model in the world. Susan Sarandon gets considerably upstaged. However as far as acting goes, Brooke ranged from amateurish to competent to flashes of delight. She was good, so good I would say in comparing her to later roles, that she has regressed. But perhaps it was Louis Malle's direction that made her seem so natural.Sarandon was flawless and seamless as usual (and never looked better). The long takes on the faces of the characters was noticeable but short of annoying. The sets were almost magical. They seemed so natural without all the usual, "Look folks, this is 1917!" kind of feeling you usually get with period piece photography. The milieu of the whore house in New Orleans in which little Violet wanders about in every room and every nook and at any time, day or night, seems natural and unforced. It's a huge child's playground in effect for the twelve-year-old who yearns to out-do mommie in being desirable to the johns.
The story line is strangely reserved. You keep expecting some real horror to explode in your face, and then you expect a heart sickening tragedy, Violet to be mutilated by one of her johns or perhaps exploited by some sick man, but the worst she gets is deflowered and slapped. The madame of the house (played brilliantly by an actress whose name I don't know) has her whipped for something, but she skips away from that saying it didn't hurt and runs off to the photographer she likes, played perhaps too Victorianly by Keith Carradine. I got the feeling he couldn't make up his mind whether he was Toulouse Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh or Professor Henry Higgins and decided to go with all three. I expected to see him grovel a little for Brooke, or debase himself à la Philip in Of Human Bondage, but Malle spares us that.
The defining sequence in the movie, and the part that reveals the real tragedy of the little girl is when she goes to the photographer's house and they begin living together and he leaves her a note that she can't read (because she is illiterate) and we see her standing behind his iron fence watching the sailors walk by (perhaps the sailors are in her future). When he comes home and we see that her child's view of the world is so different than his, we know their relationship is doomed. But we also know that she has lost her childhood and will never have a normal adolescence. That is her tragedy.
The cinematography is beautiful without calling undue attention to itself. The whore house seems real enough as a sort of French salon cum New Orleans brothel, cum Dodge City saloon. We see Brooke as close to naked as perhaps we would want. The point of the photography is to show her physical beauty, but in a naturalistic, almost nonsexual way, to show the awkwardness of the child who is about to become a woman. She never looks worse than when she's painted up and thick with lipstick. We get the point. In the scene where she is deflowered we are "threatened" with horror (she screams, the john sneaks out and they discover her motionless on the bed). But she's only joking and they all get choked up at this "rite of passage." Malle makes it like a first kiss, which for her (his point) it is.
He gets to tell it like it is sometimes with young girls and men but spares us a lot of the shock by making it clear that Brooke Shields as Violet the 12-year-old prostitute is an exception to the general rule. Yet nothing is hid from us. The slavery of the prostitute's life and bondage to her trade is made clear. The tragedy of growing up in a whore house is not glossed over; it's just that the tragedy is sugar coated like our memories of childhood, and indeed the little girl has a lot of fun in the old whore house and we know that some of her memories will be fond ones.
Finally, Violet's mother comes back for her. She has made a successful marriage with her rich respectable husband. Violet goes to her and although her photographer husband objects, he knows it's inevitable: he must lose her. She asks "Can't you come too?" We, along with Keith Carradine, get to fathom that for a long moment or two before he lets her go. The great thing about this scene is that the arrival of the mother and her rich husband just destroys their "marriage." Kaboom. We immediately see that the child's higher loyalty and greater love is to and for the mother and not her husband and her marriage, a relationship she does not understand.
It's a strange tale, bravely told with a touch of gentle genius. I'm glad I didn't have to see all the warts, but I know they were there behind the gloss and Malle left them out on purpose: and the nearly idyllic world of the child prostitute is nothing like his fairy tale, but I thank him for it anyway; after all, these things have to be told in the form of fairy tales or myths otherwise we can't accept them.