At the beginning of Girl Model, a documentary about the ugly side of beauty, a bunch of skinny young girls in a Siberian town stand around in bikinis, waiting to be judged. Awkward and gawky, hands folded modestly over their thin chests, they’re called one by one to stand in front of a couple of representatives from a modelling agency. “I feel that her hips are too big,” one of them says about a teenager, casually destroying one dream of glory.
Some of the girls are chosen, though. Nadya Vall, a pretty, boyish 13-year-old, is her family’s hope for the future: If she can be a model, her father can afford to subdivide the bedroom in the family home so his children can all sleep there. “My friends and relatives say I look like a model,” says Nadya with adolescent optimism.
Her wish is about to come true. A woman named Ashley Arbaugh, herself a former child model, is a scout for a Japanese modelling agency. The girls she picks must be not too tall, must be cute and, most especially, must be young. “Young is very important,” Arbaugh says; later, she will add that they can’t be too young, and Nadya’s look, which is practically prepubescent, makes her a natural.
So Nadya flies to Tokyo for her big break. There, she will be forgotten at the airport, housed in a tiny rundown apartment with a roommate, and taken around to various talent agencies by a man who tells her to say she is 15. She’s rejected many times; when she does get work, she isn’t paid for it. Her contract says that, if she gains one centimetre on her waist, hips or bust, she can be fired. She cries, and wants to go home.
Girl Model is a sad story with frightening undercurrents. Filmed without commentary by co-directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, it comprises a bare-bones portrait of the bare-bones children who are found, used, and often discarded in what Arbaugh acknowledges is a tough business.
There’s more than that, though lurking, just under surface. The head of the Japanese agency, for instance, is a man who “loves models,” a characterization that is allowed to lie there, an unexploded time bomb. Girl Model makes no accusations, but its drive-by portrait of exploitation is haunting.
If Nadya is the tragic heroine of Girl Model, Arbaugh is the conflicted narrator. Seemingly tormented, she lives in a cold modernistic house in Connecticut, where she keeps two dolls on the bed: her children, she says, more so than the little girls she recruits in Russia.
Arbaugh has videos of herself as a young model, when her pouty indifference came from an actual hatred of the profession and all it stood for. “It really has no weight,” she says. “It’s based on nothing.” And yet, she continues to find young girls: The world of fashion is an addiction, and her ambivalence reflects the wider culture – of youth, of beauty, of corruptible innocence – that sustains the industry.
Another model named Rachel tries to assign the blame for what happens to the girls who get lost in it: Is it the girls and their ambitions, or the agencies, or the magazines, or us? “There is no one to blame,” she says, “but the whole thing is so wrong.”
Source: http://www.canada.com/entertainment/thin+young/6531417/story.html