‘Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields Review: A Documentary Of Fascinating Depth Holds Our Voyeuristic Image Culture Up To The Light

© Courtesy of Variety

There are times when you watch a documentary about a subject you think you know well, and knowing that becomes part of the satisfaction. It's like watching your favorite drama a second time; Dig deeper and test the images. "Beauty: Brooke Shields" is like that. This 2 hour and 13 minute documentary follows the crazy story of Brooke Shields, now 57 years old, since she made her first commercial at 11 months old. She tells the story of her childhood as an advertising model, how she blossomed professionally under the tutelage of her sweet but troubled cab driver mother, Terri, and how she was sexually assaulted in films beginning at the age of 12 in Pretty Girl (1978). Then, at the age of 15, in Blue Lagoon (1980), and what it was like for him to be the center of the world's attention.

The arc of the story is beyond what is known. However, Beauty: Brooke Shields , directed by Lana Wilson (who was at Sundance three years ago with Taylor Swift's Miss America documentary), is a surprisingly well-made conventional documentary. Each chapter of Brooke Shields' life is more thoughtful, deep and archival than we've seen before, without losing sight of the big story she's telling. This is precisely why American image culture reinforces sexism. A morally weak and sensationalist art form had real consequences - for the shield at the center of it all and for us - that the image makers never cared about.

It could be said that Shields was a voyeuristic doll with the image of someone who survived. However, she found a way to handle it with courage, humor and grace. "Pretty Baby" reminds you of what a winner she was, although seeing how her image was used (completely undignified and shameless) creates a fascinating social resonance.

Brooke Shields, one of the film's many talking heads, says, "Being judged by how you look is the biggest problem with what you look like." The film captures the existential quality of this experience: what one feels and thinks about it could be on two different planets. A fixed and expressive smile, twinkling eyes, a delicate chin and (her most distinctive feature) sword-shaped eyebrows were what Pauline Kehl called "a woman with a woman's face". "She felt like she was the woman of the future," says Laura Linney, her childhood friend.

Until the 1960s, Karina Longworth, Hollywood still cultivated the Marilyn Monroe model: slim, voluptuous and mature sexuality. The documentary highlights how girls' sexuality was a direct response to the rise of second-wave feminism that began in the 1970s. Male culture seems to have regressed in search of new, powerless, subordinate and non-threatening objects of desire.

As a model, shields were at the forefront of all. In Her mother Terri, who died in 2012, said she always knew Brooke would be a star, another way of saying she was determined to be. It was a rancher on the move from Newark, New Jersey who raised Terri Brooke as a single mother. Barbara Walters asked Terry, "Has anyone told you that you are using child sex?" We saw him say. His response: "Maybe that's all I did." But that's not all I do with Brooke, or that's all Brooke does. Terri was very self-possessed and trying to make a life for Brooke and not planning anything. As Brooke became more successful, they worked after work while improving their lifestyle, but Brooke's image was the ticket to making it all happen. She's done TV commercials for band-aids, shampoos, fabric softeners, and all she shines through is her personality: lively and simple.

At the age of 10, Shields began to change the way he took pictures. She appears in skimpy dresses or veils and elegant dresses, mature make-up and "pimples". Some of the photos look amazing and typical of what we see in American fangirl beauty pageants today.

It was Louis Male's 1978 horror film "Beauty" that changed Brooke Shields' direction. In the year 1917, it was a true drama set in the Storyville district of New Orleans and based on the life of the American photographer Ernest Belack and a young woman forced into prostitution by her mother. For the first American male film, the studio wanted 14-year-old Jodie Foster, fresh off Taxi Driver. But Mal insisted to 12-year-old Brooke. He gave a real performance and entered the role with a theatrical flash, but "Beauty" is not a very good movie. The polite refusal to appreciate what Mal shows us reads like a dramatic escapism that seems morally apathetic, so distant and uncaring.

However, it was an amazing and possibly dangerous film. (There is a sequence at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival in which Shields' character is stripped and her virginity is auctioned off. The iconography of what it was: a 12-year-old girl in sexually explicit clothing.

"From that moment on," says Brooke, "I wasn't just a model, I was an actress. I became the facilitator of many things, good and bad. The film was very controversial and sparked a lot of debate, like us on The Phil Donahue Show. Terry Shields received a lot of criticism for exploiting his daughter. But, of course, he was making fun of what was beginning to become mainstream: our guilt over entertaining veiled feats (four years later, we would find "porky" pit comedy as the new sex-tinged feature of youth culture).

When Brooke was 15, she went to The Blue Lagoon, which was filmed in Fiji in 1980. They shot for four months; It was so easy to be in a place where Brooke had to live in a closet and then prepare to talk to her mother/mom who was far from immoral. But here's the paradox: The Blue Lagoon, a love story about two children stranded on a tropical island, was a more "pure" movie than Belle, but even though it was marketed as a fairy tale for teenagers, there was a way. It was more exploitative. It was conceived as a cross-calendar image for larger chronologies, such as the story of Adam and Eve, as David Hamilton conceived. Brooke is talking about it now: "They wanted to do a reality show. They wanted to sell me real sexual stimulation.

Brooke Shields' third drama, Forbidden Image, was not a movie, but a series of commercials: a TV campaign for Calvin Klein jeans shot by Richard Avedon, in which she starred at the age of 16, and it was also her advertising career. "Time to get out the baby stuff," she says because "I'm ready for Calvins," and then ends the ad with a thumbs-up. His performances in many commercials were incredibly honest - his most successful performance to date. However, the ad caused more controversy than "Pretty Baby" and was banned in some markets.

Klein himself did not apologize. He was proud of his bad boy image and found himself legitimately broken by the ad. They changed the culture and did everything to start the 80s fashion revolution (we see high school girls interviewing and saying they spend thousands of dollars on clothes, and this was in 1981). Brooke's relationship with Klein is also drawn into the Warholian maelstrom of Studio 54, which does everything possible. It was everywhere, on TV and on red carpets. She became an icon in one word: Brooke.

Shields tells us that he was dangerously disconnected from his debut in 1981's Loveless Love, filming a big sex scene and watching the show. It's there, but it's not there. He needed to get out of the fun, and he did when he got into Princeton, breaking the idea that he was beautiful and crazy. The first half of Pretty Baby is an autobiographical essay, allowing us to touch on Shields' stigma as her image is repeatedly used against her in the world. (She and her mother's relative, Gary Gross, were accused of impersonating "Lalita" after she was arrested for two days trying to sell her nude photos for a book at Rizzoli's cafe.)

The second part of the film shows how his feelings and identity begin to merge after that. Taking time off to attend college hurt his career, but saved his life. After a four-year hiatus, it was no longer a hot commodity, and a new generation of stars emerged in the youth comedy boom of the early 1980s. But he found his way. The film chronicles her failed marriage to Andre Agassi, her friendship with Michael Jackson she described as "very childish" (it broke up when she revealed they met), the devastating end of postpartum depression, her struggles with emotional distress. Tom Cruise tells a harrowing self-deprecating tale of the drugs he took to make it and being hired by a producer who believed he had been sexually assaulted. His initial instinct to blame himself strikes the film's saddest note.

We also follow the peak of his career, when he landed a part in the sitcom Sudden Susan, the show that allowed him to become what he probably always should have been: a great comedian. And we see it with his family, an impromptu dinner conversation between him and his teenage daughters who have never seen two of his most famous films is poignant and revealing. About all of them, we feel how the world has been changed by their brave wisdom.

At certain points, the documentary talks about how the world saw Brooke in her image, but didn't have enough interest (or knowledge) of who she really was. We think: It certainly is, but it's a mirror game that reflects the nature of celebrity culture. But at the beauty end, you know who the real Brooke is. The film has got an impressive gross. Yes, we know the story before, but here we have a taste of the journey that the shields took. We look through the glass of what is too lascivious and unrealistic celebrity culture and see what is on the other side.

Click here to read the full article.

Angelina Jolie ~ Dark mysterious woman + her brother's strange behavior and obsession with the dead