Pretty Baby (1978) | Louis Malle
Louis Malle is famous for his unconventional way of canvassing the world: he used filmmaking as his personal tool for examining foreign perspectives of experience. He was determined to offer the audience new realms and horizons of thought. However, his art was often censored and marginalized, leaving him disregarded as a dilettante. The topics he challenged were not only socially, but morally and spiritually provocative. Something that links Pretty Baby with some of his other motion pictures is the adolescent point of view. This particular choice of style helped him in his exploration of the concept of “loss of innocence”. He was transfixed by the moment of corruption of the child by the adult, who embodies the touch with reality. He chooses his character (Violet, portrayed by Brooke Shields) to be socially-exiled and living in a spiritually and morally isolated area. Malle decides to focus on a child raised in a whorehouse to investigate the genesis of amorality and its relations to nature and nurture. Storyville functions as a societal petri dish: its legal separation from the rest of the country leads to its moral and spiritual isolation from the surrounding world. Pretty Baby is also a study of Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze, which links with the idea that the child is imbued with oozing sexuality by adults themselves. Violet becomes a libidinal tabula rasa, a blank visage onto which the spectators project their own desires. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
