Pretty Baby started off very well and I immediately thought: This is gonna be a gem! But it seemingly lost steam in the second half, petering out quite disappointingly towards the end. It was as if Louis Malle had been in a bit of a rush to conclude the story. Brooke Shields really was an angelically beautiful child - she seemingly peeked so early! The atmosphere in the brothel scenes was the best thing about the movie, probably helped by the fact that the photographer Bellocq's real photographs were used to get a sense of the time and place and evoke it with authenticity. Viewers particularly touchy to the issue of underage sex beware, as the movie doesn't spare modern sensibilities with the fact that the concept of a girl being too young for sex (if she was deemed sexually attractive) wasn't even an issue for most men in the early 20th century! That said, there are thankfully no explicit scenes - you just know what is happening and painfully squirm in your chair while it does! One qualm I did have with the movie was some of the slightly sloppy costuming: some of the clothes worn here seemed a little earlier than 1917, more like a decade earlier. Furthermore, the way everyone reacted to the pictures Bellocq, the young photographer took of the prostitutes seemed very anachronistic, and made me lose respect for the movie (Bellocq is a figure that actually existed, though the specific story built around him in the movie is fictional). Photography was by 1917 no longer considered a sort of "magic", viewed with incredulous wonder (as the characters in the movie react to it). This would have been more historically exact for a story set in, say, 1850 or thereabouts! I found that aspect to be a ridiculous - its makers really should have known better.
Review of Pretty Baby
