A Child's Garden of Sin

By Frank Rich

PRETTY BABY

Directed by Louis Malle, Screenplay by Polly Plan

By all rights, Pretty Baby should have been Louis Malle's masterpiece. The movie is the story of a child prostitute in New Orleans during World War I, and no film maker is better equipped to tell that story than Malle. As he demonstrated in Murmur of the Heart and Lacombe, Lucien, this great French director has a deep understanding of the process by which benign children change into corrupt adults. Like his old New Wave colleague, Franc,ois Truffaut, he also has the ability to portray children on-screen without condescension or sentimentality. These talents are evident in Pretty Baby; yet the movie does not work. Even though Malle has approached his film's potentially grisly subject with taste and compassion, Pretty Baby is often static and almost always shallow.

Since this is Malle's first American movie, one could argue that the director has been defeated by transatlantic cultural jet lag. To some extent this is true. Much of the film's dialogue, which is ridden with whorehouse-fiction cliches, would never be tolerated by Malle were he working in a French milieu. The same goes for some of the actors, who seem to have been cast more on the basis of looks than ability. Still, the movie's major troubles cannot be explained away so easily, for at its heart there is a failure of will. While Malle has had no difficulty making films about teen age boys who commit incest (Murmur) or murder (Lacombe), he has been defeated by the pre-teen prostitute of Pretty Baby. The movie circles around its heroine without ever zeroing in on her.

Watching the film is often like staring at a confounding blur: Pretty Baby's narrative often seems to be languishing somewhere in the film's hazy background. That's a shame, because the screenplay is built around an exciting idea. Malle and Scenarist Polly Platt have hypothesized a romance--and eventual marriage--between Heroine Violet (Brooke Shields) and E.J. Bellocq (Keith Carradine), the legendary photographer of Storyville's glory days. This couple's bizarre March-December affair, like the equally promising relationship between Violet and her prostitute mother (Susan Sarandon), is described only intermittently. Instead of coming to terms with the characters' emotions, Malle dithers away his movie on rowdy sequences that depict the upstairs-downstairs antics of his oldtime sporting-house setting. Despite Sven Nykvist's fine cinematography and a rousing jazz score, a little of the film's nostalgic atmosphere goes a long way. Padding, however lush, is still padding.

Malle tries to make the movie's flavor pass for substance by rilling the film with portentous zoom shots, but the ruse does not succeed. The cast does not do much to flesh out the material either. Be sides having no resemblance to the real Bellocq, Carradine rarely gets a handle on the mysterious photographer-hero. With his sepulchral demeanor, he looks less like an obsessed artist than a constipated undertaker. Sarandon, sputtering like a road-show Tennessee Williams heroine, never creates a credible character. Nor does Singer Frances Faye, playing an ancient madam who does an obligatory mad scene when reformers close down her business.

The one stunning exception in this crew is Shields. A child model of astounding beauty, she is also, at least at twelve, a natural actress. It is chilling to watch her come on to Johns, aping the older whores' bedroom spiel in a mock-adult voice; her scenes with men are the movie's best. Though the film does not explicitly show Violet's bedroom activities, Shields is at times a sexual figure. A volatile mixture of both innocence and carnality, she makes the audience feel that anything can happen when she is around.

But precious little ever does take place. At the end of the film, Violet is leaving New Orleans to start a normal life; the movie closes with a freeze frame of her face while she waits for a train north. Malle apparently believes this closeup resolves his story: he wants to show that Violet has already started to harden into a dull, defeated adult. But one look at Shields' face and we see that Malle is wrong. The fascinating secrets of this girl's childhood still lurk in her wide blue eyes, waiting to be unlocked. Far from being over, the movie Malle promised has yet to begin.

-- Frank Rich

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