Pretty Baby, written by Polly Platt and Louis Malle, directed by the latter - Nine out of 10

Pretty Baby, written by Polly Platt and Louis Malle, directed by the latter

Nine out of 10

This motion picture has been included on The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made list - https://www.listchallenges.com/new-york-times-best-1000-movies-ever-made/list/18 - and it was nominated for the prize that is more valuable than the Oscars, The Palme d’Or, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978, where it has won the Technical Grand Prize, and to add to all that, it has the special honor of getting the note with the magical number 2,000 from the undersigned, on his blog for films http://notesaboutfilms.blogspot.com/

Having praised the film in the extreme, now is the moment to demolish it – just kidding – in the sense that it might be impossible to make today, for it involves a very young actress, Brooke Shields, who was perhaps ten at the time of filming, which in itself does not exclude participation and tremendous success in a movie, as witnessed recently with the performance of the outstanding Roman Griffin Davis in Jojo Rabbit (http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/12/jojo-rabbit-written-and-directed-by.html)

Nevertheless, in Pretty Baby, where she has the leading role of Violet, Brooke Shields has to play the role of a juvenile, underage girl living in a brothel with her mother, Hattie aka splendid Susan Sarandon, exposing her naked body, although not completely, in one ‘single session’, having to witness the ‘workings’ of a house of sin, eventually being auctioned to the highest bidder, who would enjoy her ‘services’ offered for the first time, at the moment when they decide to end her virginity and innocence.

Indeed, even before that, the girl is trained into the art of seduction, with the sex workers – as they seem to be addressed in the politically correct language of our age – telling the child – this is what she is at that age, is it not – how to address the customers, to take their private parts and act with alluring, improper gestures for one who is abused, raising the question about what was the decency in making the child actress get into all that, in the sense that although she does not have ‘sex scenes’ per se, she does kiss Bellocq aka Keith Carradine – an Oscar winner, but somehow appearing inadequate at times in the role of a photographer that is close to the mother first, then to the daughter…

Evidently they have explained to the young artist what different moments would entail, but wouldn’t that affect her development, the involvement in drama, intimacies, meanings that would impossible to comprehend and assimilate at a tender age, not to mention the need for her to expose now and then her emerging breasts, the lower part, if shown a few times only from behind and asking her overall to express emotions, attitudes of an upcoming prostitute – to use the notion used at that time…

It is understandable and maybe even commendable that the film makers, Louis Malle in particular wanted to expose the gravity, abuse committed in the past and the suffering of the child, The Pretty Baby, but there is discomfort in the knowledge that in order to describe what happened to one beautiful girl, another has to be going through a less tormenting experience of course, but still traumatizing to a certain, perhaps high degree…

Louis Malle is a mesmerizing film maker, the one who has given cinephiles the magna opera that includes Murmur of the Heart - http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/12/murmur-of-heart-aka-le-souffle-au-coeur.html - Vanya on 42nd Street - http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/06/vanya-on-42nd-street-based-on-uncle.html – and Au Revoir les Enfants http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/03/au-revoir-les-enfants-written-and.html  to mention only those three exquisite features.

Pretty Baby might be more difficult to watch than the aforementioned Louis Malle motion pictures, but it is surely thought provoking, intelligent, though somewhat sinister at times, placed in 1917, in the red district and we need to think of the moeurs of the age, the fact that girls would be married very soon, at an age where they should not be embracing husbands but studying and some of them still playing with dolls, but this might be just the point and worthy works place difficult questions and it is better to watch Pretty Baby on any day, perhaps, than The Avengers or X Men…

One of the most outrageous scenes is the one in which Violet, who had been ‘educated’ and trained in the games of erotic capture, is brought to the main, big room of the whore house and men are invited to bid for her virginity, with a starting offer of twenty dollars, raising by stages to the $ 400 – which would be some tens of thousands in the currency of the present – offered by the winner, a middle aged character that is told by the girl that she fancies him, no doubt following the advice on How to win Friends and Influence People…

The incident is not without drama, for the pure child is taken upstairs and the man would take off, apparently scared by something, running down the stairs and then off the premises and the girls that hurry to see what happened find the ‘working girl’ in what looks like a faint or maybe a coma, but when her mother arrives on the scene, Violet laughs and acts as if all is well, even if we could be sure that this was a defense mechanism and everything about that auction and the rest of this sick game was despicable and outrageous…

In other words, this is a complex movie, making the audience uneasy, inviting us to think of this abominable past, but also the present in which there are so many parts of the world, one could say most of the earth, where girls are still sold off, mutilated in barbaric ‘religious surgery’ and treated as slaves in regions like fundamental Islamic lands, territories in Africa and in places in India…