Take One (Jul 1978)

FILM REVIEWS ERE EY. baby Directed by Louis Malle A Paramount Pictures release. Produced and directed by Louis Malle. Screenplay by Polly Platt, from a story by Platt and Malle (based on material from Al Rose’s book, Storyville, New Orleans). Director of Photography: Sven Nykvist. Supervising Editor: Suzanne Baron. Film Editor: Suzanne Fenn. Music. Adaptation and Supervision: Jerry Wexler. Solo Piano by Bob Greene. Cast: Brooke Shields, Keith Carradine, Susan Sarandon, Frances Faye, Antonio Fargas. Ever since I heard that Louis Malle was planning to shoot his first American film in New Orleans, I longed to inject into it some of my own childhood in that city, a childhood diametrically removed from that of a Storyville house of prostitution, but nonetheless bound to it with the same subcutaneous rhythms, the long summer’s sweat and torpor, and the distinctive background of Mediterranean, African, and Anglo-Saxon traditions. Few of my own feelings about New Orleans fit in with those Malle has created for Pretty Baby. In fact, the film’s best moments revolve around its dark, luxuriant, limbo-like interiors, which create a lost world of their own and have little to do with New Orleans per se. Based on bits and pieces of real recollections about life in the famed red-light district of New Orleans—and particularly about the ways children of brothel women earn their keep with their own juvenile prostitution—the film does shock, despite its distant, passionless approach to professional sex, and its mere allusions to some of the extreme practises. A sort of triple-threat voyeurism dominates the scenes of Susan Sarandon (as Hattie, a prostitute) posing nude from the waist, and 12-year-old Brooke Shields (as Violet, Hattie’s daughter) stretched out odalisque-fashion entirely nude—the voyeurism of Keith Carradine (as Bellocq) photographing them with his still camera; of Malle, filming the scenes with long-lingering stillness; and of ourselves, fixated by the compelling flesh. In other scenes Malle shocks, or attempts to shock, with long tight close-ups of the mask-like faces of Frances Faye (as Nell, the Madam), Antonio Fargas (as the pianist called Professor), and beautiful Brooke Shields and expressionless Keith Carradine —but after several rounds, tedium takes over. Malle surrounds these stillnesses with visual detail, with the ennobling assistance of Sven Nykvist, camera magician. Deep velvet colors counter the expressive whites of bodies and bodices. Carefully arranged figures and faces pose and posture like well-trained models. Stained glass windows illumine the near-darkness of steep-staired 6 Shields and Carradine: Much of the film's attraction rests with its pre-pubescent heroine. hallways. Paint peels on the kitchen walls. Some of the film’s best moments reveal the incongruous, off-hours activities that make a house something of a home as well: deliveries of groceries and meat, women in rag curlers, the inscrutable piano tuner at work, the white light of morning outside where Hattie is being photographed, and where the children ride on a pony. Sometimes, but not often, visual hyperbole outreaches credibility, as in the palminfested garden where Violet poses with her baby doll—a shot which better suits the advertisements than the film. Often sound is entirely sacrificed for appearance’s sake. Fargas, for example, as the pianist-andphilosopher of the establishment, charms in many ways except the essential one: he cannot play the piano, and thus his music is removed from the living presence it should have been to ordinary background accompaniment. While Bob Greene’s offscreen piano entertains joyfully enough, I would have opted for less correct music actually performed before my eyes. Only one incidental line of dialogue, to my ears, carried the New Orleans voice convincingly, and it seemed out of place in a confusion of accents ranging from Frances Faye’s unacceptable attempts to say the word ‘“‘monsieur’’ to Susan Sarandon’s beguiling imitation of Southern speech. Carradine’s silences were particularly ungolden, and his enigmatic sentences frequently rang flat. Pretty Baby also lacks story-line and structure strong enough to bind its assorted characters one to another, and to a solid sense of time and place. In the first few shots, Violet’s look of harrowed fascination suggests that she’s witnessing a sexual act, and the ensuing shots sardonically reveal her mother birthing little Will, a sexual act once removed. In the last shot, two-year old Willie in his sailor suit, Hattie’s welldraped fur neckpiece, her husband’s pointed snapshot camera, and Violet’s beribboned hair, present a wealth of visual detail and suggestion to slyly mock family respectability. The care that went into the individual shots, however, is sadly missing from the film as a whole. Therefore, one watches shots and scenes, not without interest; but these somehow fail to collect into dramatic tensions, or a sense of passing time (or even timelessness), or inner development, or change. Much of the film’s attraction rests with its prepubescent heroine. What James Agee wrote of 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor when she appeared in National Velvet might also be said of 12-year-old Brooke Shields: ‘‘I wouldn’t say she is particularly gifted as an actress. . . She seems, rather, to turn things off and on, much as she is told. . .”’ Agee found young Miss Taylor ‘‘rapturously beautiful,’” while Brooke Shields seems strangely so, like other models-turnedmovie-star (Cybill Shepherd, Lauren Bacall) whose strongest presence is in stillness, but who move awkwardly from one place and position to another. With all its weaknesses, Pretty Baby should be seen, not merely for its own sake but also in respect to its director. For when so fine an independent filmmaker as Louis Malle manages to make a film of his own choosing under Hollywood’s terms, he must be saluted for somehow surviving the transmigration. Pretty Baby has already made it at the box-office, and in the movie business that counts first. What comes next? Cecile Starr Cecile Starr refers readers to Agee’s reviews of National Velvet and The Southerner for his thoughts on some of the problems that arise in Pretty Baby.