Pretty Baby (1978)

I confess that I first sought out Louis Malle's Pretty Baby merely because of the torrent of ongoing online controversy that encircled it some forty years after its making. At that point, I was a 19-year-old college student, and of the whole cast and crew, was only familiar with Susan Sarandon (whose career I devised my entire second year film studies project on). Nowadays, I know much about many of the people involved, and most recently, began to read Brooke Shields' autobiography There Was a Little Girl, which details the infamous relationship she had with her mother Teri. I sometimes wonder at how society seems to have gone backwards in so many of its ideas and tolerances, and how the more time goes by, the more incredible it seems that a movie like Pretty Baby was ever made; it certainly wouldn't be nowadays, perhaps in the same way as Lolita, which director Stanley Kubrick later lamented that he could not take to the full extent of his source material, because of 1960s Hollywood censors.

Pretty Baby is a period piece, about a prostitute named Hattie (Sarandon) and her pre-adolescent daughter Violet (Shields), who live in a New Orleans brothel in the early 20th century, just before and during and after the legal clamp-down on the sex industry. Much to the uproar of the small-minded back in the '70s - and to this day - the visual narrative includes a couple of very brief shots of young Brooke Shields, who was only 11 or so when she filmed, naked. But let us start this debate by going back to the definition of pornography, which is material created with the intent of titillating or arousing the viewer. Now, if you are of broad mind, you will accept that a photograph or video of a person naked - whatever their age - does not fit this definition, as nudity is not inherently sexual; an idea modern society is losing grip of. I would argue that the next step in this logic is that a movie tells a story through a combination of narrative media: visuals, sound, etc. As I have mentioned in previous reviews, we as an audience need to see and hear and feel the full extent of our characters' lives if we are going to feel for them. If we had not seen in gruesome detail the cruelties of Joffrey Baratheon, would we have as much reason to hate him?

The movie opens with the gutteral groans of a woman, and a fade in of the bemused and intrigued Violet's face. We all instantly ask the same question: is she witnessing pain or ecstasy? The questions that these speechless opening moments force us to ask ourselves carry on throughout the movie. As it happens, Violet is watching her mother Hattie give birth to another john's illegitimate baby. But, I concede, whether Violet had been bearing witness to childbirth or paid fornication, the experience would have been just as relevant to her life, and to our experience as an audience.

Violet and Hattie live in the glamorous brothel of Madame Nell (Frances Faye), a wide, darkwood classical house with moody burgundy interiors and all the sophistication of the many palaces the elder March daughters visited in Little Women. Here, men of position go there to fulfill their fantasies, and one day, the time has come for young Violet, whose age is never explicitly revealed, to be deflowered by a paying customer. The girl sweet-talks the winning bidder in the naive, scripted way only an eleven-year-old who has been instructed what to say could - much to his disdain.

In between all this action, a photographer has arrived at Madame Nell's, seeking models for his intimate portraits of Louisiana prostitution. He is Bellocq (Keith Carradine), a stern but sensitive being whose heart breaks over the auctioning of Violet's virginity. Among his work with the other women, the girl becomes enamoured with him - again, as only eleven-year-olds do - and he with her, though in a far more paternal and protective fashion. When the fuzz are closing down all the brothels, Hattie moves out with the john  who impregnated her and their illegitimate son, leaving Violet behind. Bellocq marries her in an attempt to save her from a life of imminent poverty and abuse.

Pretty Baby is a long, brooding and sensuous movie, and anyone who pays attention to it can see it for what it is. The odd naked shot is a natural extension of the situation, and as Roger Ebert so gracefully put it, "it's an evocation of a time and a place, and a sad chapter of Americana". The young Brooke Shields shows immense capability that her later career didn't seem to present opportunities to demonstrate, while Carradine conjures the same sorrowful, fair-haired onlooking lover that Peter Firth did in the same year in Roman Polanski's version of Tess.

I love Pretty Baby. It is a rare sort of movie that gives me the low, underlying stirrings of sympathy and yearning that real life relationships give me. Not the kind that make you shout at the screen about what the characters should do, but the kind that moves you, as if your close friend were living this same existence, and an external feeling of remorse and sorrow, yet lack of control over the chaos.