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Pretty BabyWhen Pretty Baby was released, it provoked outrage, which came as no surprise seeing as its central character is a 12-year-old prostitute.
It's 1917, and Violet (Shields) lives with her hooker mother, Hattie (Sarandon), in a baroque brothel in Storyville - New Orleans' red light district. The bordello, run by Madame Nell (Faye) is the only home Violet's known. At 12, her virginity is auctioned off for $400. She's comfortable with that. She's been brought up to please the johns, and when Hattie heads off to make a better life for herself, Violet chooses to stay in Storyville. She befriends photographer E J Bellocq (a real-life figure played by Carradine) who's documenting life in Madame Nell's establishment. He's fascinated with the girl - sexually and artistically - and they wed. Meanwhile Hattie has married well and wants Violet to join her. But how will she cope with 'respectability'?
This was French director Louis Malle's first US film. It explores many topics - sexual awakening, public morality, that grey area between art and pornography - but it's also about Malle's pet theme of social alienation. Before Violet turns pro, she's a little girl lost in the brothel. Her relationship with Bellocq is unbalanced due to their age difference, and when she enters the 'real' world, her experience ensures that she'll always be different. Her tragedy is that she's most at home as a prostitute, and despite all the furore about 12-year-old Shields appearing fully nude and simulating sex, it is this fact that makes Pretty Baby a truly shocking film.
Malle treads through the minefield of child sexuality with great care. Sometimes, understandably, a little too much care, but the film explores its issues with enough candour to retain its relevance in a time when any debate about public morality is drowned out by tabloid hysteria. It's also a visual feast with lavish period detail exquisitely photographed by Sven Nykvist, one of the great lighting cameramen.
Shields' performance is extraordinarily rounded for a pre-pubescent actress and shows a promise that she subsequently failed to fulfil. A life in front of the camera (she started modelling when she was one) ensures that (thankfully) she's entirely at ease here, but the film must have had an effect on her. She is, after all, now famous for preaching the sanctity of virginity.
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